[OpenAFS] Setting up new cell on RHEL4 - some help needed

[Chris Huebsch]

Hello,

On Wed, 22 Aug 2007, Robert Sturrock wrote:

> (I admit I don't really understand "dynroot" - it's enabled by default
> when the openafs-client starts, but I'm not sure if I want/need this or
> not).

This seems to be the reason for your trouble.

In former times (when Linux was just born), the content of /afs was
delivered by a volume itself (named root.afs). All this volume contained
were mountpoints to root.cell-volumes of other cells. An admin had to
maintain those mountpoints so that the users of the cell can browse to
other cells.

Later it became obvious, that maintaining root.afs manually is a lot of
work if you want to be up to date. At that time dynroot was invented.

Using dynroot, the afs-client does no longer mount root.afs as /afs, but
populates /afs automagically with mount-points to root.cell of the
requested cells. Which cells are available are (at first) managed by the
CellServDB file on the client.

So if you changedir to /afs/foobar.tld, the cache manager looks into
CellServDB if it can find a cell with foobar.tld. If so, it creates a
kind of virtual mount point and tries to locate root.cell of that cell.

So you have two options. Turn dynroot off (it is configured in
/etc/sysconfig/(open)afs on Redhat systems) and do what the manual tells
you. Or use dynroot and ignore everything regarding root.afs (including
trying to fs chacl'ing /afs).

HTH

Chris
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