[OpenAFS] OpenAFS vs Vista

[Jeffrey Altman]

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I want to provide you with an update on OpenAFS compatibility and
Windows Vista.  A couple of months ago a bug was discovered in the
Vista NetBIOS stack that would cause OpenAFS to crash anytime the
operating system was placed into "Standby" mode.   Microsoft took
the bug seriously and fixed it.  Unfortunately, the produced instability
in other areas of the operating system and Microsoft was forced to
pull the fix.  Therefore, the final Vista release that will be made
publicly available in January is going to cause existing OpenAFS
versions to crash.

As far as I can tell there is no work around to avoid the problem.
Microsoft has had an engineer working on the problem for a couple of
weeks without success.

Microsoft is committed to fixing this bug for Vista SP1.  Once a fix
is available they will most likely make a QFE available to customers
that have support contracts.

This has left OpenAFS in an awkward situation until a fix is available.
 The best that I believe I can do is cause OpenAFS to gracefully
shutdown when this error condition is detected.  The benefit of a
graceful shutdown is that the data stored in the cache will be
preserved.   However, if there were applications with files open within
AFS at the time of Vista entering "Standby" mode, these files would not
be available when the Operating System restarts.

It is my hope that Microsoft will allow OpenAFS to distribute the QFE
(when available) as part of the OpenAFS installers.  If so, the majority
of the damage can be avoided.

The long term solution is clear.  The OpenAFS community needs to move
away from the SMB Gateway model and replace it with a native Network
Provider / File System Filter model.  Completing this work in such a
way that it is portable across Windows 2000 SP4 through Vista and
works on both 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems is going to be time
consuming and expensive.  I hired a Windows file system and kernel
driver developer to review the work that has already been done and
help design an architecture that can support all of the required
platforms for the next ten years.  We believe that this work can be
accomplished over a period of ten months provided that the necessary
financial resources ($250,000 - $300,000) can be acquired.

The long term benefits of getting rid of the SMB gateway are:

(1) the use of the Microsoft Loopback Adapter will no longer be required

(2) all of the problems associated with the CIFS client timeout issues
    will be removed.   this will not only improve performance but will
    solve all of the "delayed write" and "network path no longer
    available" errors.

(3) performance gains.  There is significant time delays and CPU
    load added to each transaction as a result of the CIFS client and
    SMB server both involving the SMB/NetBIOS/TCP/IP stack.

If your organization is in a position to assist us in financing this
work, please contact me off-list.

Jeffrey Altman
OpenAFS Gatekeeper/Elder




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