[OpenAFS] using afs for unix config files

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 2:11 PM -0700 7/27/06, David Bear wrote:
>I am wondering how wise it is to use afs to store config
>files like
>
>/etc/hosts
>/etc/resolv.conf
>...
>
>can anyone comment on their experience using afs to store
>these files and which config files seem to be less well
>suited to putting in afs?

It depends on what you mean by "putting them in afs"...

We put plenty of our config files in afs, which is useful
because we make sure afs is well-backed up.  But we do
not run those machines with them reading config files
directly from afs.  Instead, we have a crontab-controlled
job which run once a day, and compares the versions of
the files in afs with the versions on the local hard
disk.  If there is a difference, we copy the files from
afs to the local hard disk, and possibly reboot the
machine.  Thus, we could change something like /etc/hosts
on a lot of machines by just changing one file in afs.

but local hard disks are certainly big enough now that
the files all fit quite well on the local machine, and
there's no good reason to have every DNS lookup running
off into /afs space just to read /etc/resolv.conf.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad@gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad@freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih@rpi.edu