[OpenAFS] software for windows start out of OpenAFS Filespace?

[Christopher D. Clausen]

Lars Schimmer <l.schimmer@cgv.tugraz.at> wrote:
>> Incoherent ramblings aside, take it from someone who has worked in
>> the trenches.  DON'T do it.  You are setting yourself up for more
>> pain than gain by trying to screw an application into running from a
>> network (on Windows).  With 'nix environments it is virtually
>> painless.
>
> Thanks for this long text and it showed me some new facts and a lot of
> "ahh!" :-)
> Mostly I think about making one AFS folder for software "that runs out
> of AFS" for our customers.
> It seems to be eaier to keep ONE directory in sync with actual/fixed
> version instead of X clients.
> To bad, there are really just some packages which runs out of AFS.
> Lets see if I find some more apps here.

Note that I've found that many applications work fine out of AFS, but 
their installers will NOT install to a UNC path, even on a real MSFT 
CIFS share.  To get around this, I installed them to a local "S:" 
parition and then copied the files into AFS and mapped this location to 
S: after deleting the local partition and things mostly worked.

I attempted to put about 1500 utilities into AFS and add that to my 
PATH.  This was painfully slow.  However, there have been some 
improvements since then, so maybe its better now.  Not sure if the 
number of files was the issue or what, but it was so slow that it wasn't 
usable for me.  Perhaps I need fewer utilities or a larger local AFS 
cache.

<<CDC