[OpenAFS] Basic OpenAFS questions

[Davor Ocelic]

On Wed, 25 Jun 2008 10:26:30 -0700 (PDT)
outsider <aonsen@gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> I'm considering using OpenAFS on my home system/LAN, but have a few
> questions first (things thate not quite clear) before I take the
> plunge.
> 
> 1. Is AFS a tool that is used on top of existing file systems? Do I
> still format my partition with ext3 and then add it to OpenAFS ? Or
> does the partition get formated using the OpenAFS FS?

You need a separate partition just for AFS; AFS will arrange the data
in there as sees fit.

> 2. On a setup with multiple drives/shares/partitions how does OpenAFS
> manage where data gets written? Does it fill up one volume before
> moving on the next? Does it spread the data evenly between all the
> volumes?

You create a AFS volume on a partition (which may be physical or
something like LVM).

Size of a volume cannot exceed size of the partition, so on fixed
100GB partition you know right away that's the limit on the size of
volume data.

Besides the obvious solution of having big enough or
resizeable partitions, another thing you can do if need be is
mount other volumes somewhere in the big data tree and split total
size to two volumes.

In case you'll have multiple servers, there's also a command that
can move a volume from server to server and to a possibly bigger
partition. This can be done without any downtime on the volume.

> 3. If I remove a drive from the OpenAFS system, will that drive still
> be readable on it's own? (I guess this will be answered by question 1)

No.

-doc