[OpenAFS] Some advice please

[Matt Hampton]

Hi

I have probably missed this whilst looking through the FAQ so forgive me
if I am asking stupid questions.

I am looking to migrate to a DFS to provide increased resilience to our
business and to allow us to scale as required.

We provide distributed email filtering (i.e. anti-spam etc) and need to
start provide archiving.

We also host email accounts (in Maildir format) which we would also like
to move to a more distributed architecture.

So my questions are as follows:

1. Can I configure AFS to always store a file on at least two servers.
2. If I store files in /afs/My.Identifier/archive and need to increase
space is it as simple as introducing a new server.
3. I know there are issues with any DFS and simultaneous access to files
(e.g. when using shared IMAP folders based on mailbox) but by using
Maildir have I reduced this issue?
4. I am intending to have a number of IMAP/POP3 servers which would be
round robin load balanced with about an hour TTL would this also help
with the issue in 3?

Any other suggestions would be welcomed!

Finally

We have are servers on rented dedicated servers which we do not have
physical or console access to.  They are all based on CentOS and do not
have partitions available - could someone point me in the direction on
how to move these servers to be AFS clients only using SSH access?

Thanks for any help,

regards

Matt