[OpenAFS] OpenAFS Newsletter, Issue 4, August 2009
Jason Edgecombe
jason@rampaginggeek.com
Sun, 09 Aug 2009 20:57:28 -0400
Here is the August 2009 issue of the OpenAFS Newsletter. An HTML version
is available at
http://www.openafs.org/newsletter/newsletter-2009-08-volume001-issue04.html
OpenAFS Newsletter, Issue 4, August 2009
Welcome to the fourth issue of the OpenAFS newsletter. This newsletter
summarizes what is happening in the OpenAFS community.
As always, volunteers, patches, bug reports, or any other type of help
is greatly appreciated.
Feedback on this newsletter is welcome. The goal is to summarize the
various development efforts and news of OpenAFS for the community.
Please let Jason Edgecombe <jason@rampaginggeek.com> know what you would
like to see out of this newsletter. Any news about AFS-related projects
is welcome and may be submitted to Jason for inclusion in the next
newsletter.
(On a personal note, I received thanks from the Elders and other folks
for my work on this newsletter. I would like to say "thanks for the
recognition, and I couldn't do it without the project leaders who put up
with me bugging them for monthly status updates. ;)" --Jason)
The current and past issues of this newsletter are available at
<http://www.openafs.org/newsletter/>
General OpenAFS Progress
For people following the progress of OpenAFS development, you've no
doubt noticed a lot of changes. For those who haven't, the third great
movement forward is upon us (the first happened with the open-sourcing
of AFS; the second, when the Windows client was again adopted and
development moved forward). A number of small new features have become
available, but more importantly, thanks to a large number of fixes to
compile-time warnings throughout the codebase, a number of bugs, many
longstanding, have been uncovered and corrected.
We've also received contributions of code for GUI tools for MacOS, both
an installer plugin for client configuration, and a preferences pane;
the process of restructuring code to allow the Unix client cache manager
to manage data not served by traditional Rx fileservers has begun;
Finally, new supporting code for other planned enhancements, including
the MCAS library as needed for extended callback support, have been
incorporated.
At the same time, effort has again begun to be expended in the direction
of creating a stable 1.6 release candidate. 1.5.61 was released on
August 5. Bug reports, especially bug reports for servers, are requested
to help us with this effort.
--Derrick
Events
AFS Hackathon
The School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh will be hosting
an AFS Hackathon 22-24 September (immediately before the European AFS
Conference). All OpenAFS developers are welcome to attend - please see
the email to openafs-announce for details, and RSVP to sxw@inf.ed.ac.uk
European AFS Meeting
The University Roma Tre will host the 2009 European AFS Meeting from
September 28-30. The European workshop is mainly a platform for system
administrators to exchange their knowledge and report use cases. Topics
of interest include related technologies like Kerberos or LDAP and all
supported operating systems.
For more details, go to <http://www.dia.uniroma3.it/~afscon09/>
Annual Best Practices Workshop
Plans are already underway for the seventh Workshop, to be held May
24-28, 2010, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. We hope
to see you there.
Projects
Security Releases
Security Officer:
* Simon Wilkinson <sxw@inf.ed.ac.uk>
No security issues since 1.4.9, 1.4.10, and 1.5.59 were released in
April 2009.
Git & Gerrit
Project Contact:
* Simon Wilkinson <sxw@inf.ed.ac.uk>
People who were instrumental in the conversion to git include Michael
Meffie, Max Cohan, Simon Wilkinson, Derrick Brashear, and the git
developer community, especially Shawn Pearce and Johannes Schindlein.
The Git conversion is a major change. Gerrit has been operational for
slightly over a week, and already 80 changes were submitted. Most
changes are going in within a couple of days. This is a clearing of
backlog from things that people already had in their personal
repositories, but still, it's clear that the new tools will make a huge
difference.
The CVS repository for the openafs web site has been converted to git
and connected to Gerrit. Web site changes may be submitted to Gerrit and
can be approved just like source code contributions. A different
authentication group for web site approvals was created in Gerrit.
Rx OSD integration & Raw Vicep Access in Clients
Project Contacts:
* Hartmut Reuter <reuter@rzg.mpg.de>
* Felix Frank <Felix.Frank@Desy.de>
* Christof Hanke <hanke@rzg.mpg.de>
The developers of the RxOSD branch have started to work on a protocol
draft for the OSD-extension. Their progress can be watched at
http://pfanne.rzg.mpg.de/trac/openAFS-OSD/wiki/SpecDraft. Any comments
are welcome. A series of patches has already been submitted to gerrit,
and some of the code is part of the OpenAFS development branch already.
--Christof
*BSD Support
Project Contacts:
* Matt Benjamin <matt@linuxbox.com>
New targets added for OpenBSD, all AMD64 subtargets up to 4.5. FreeBSD
and NetBSD work in ongoing. I expect to send a more detailed status
report before next newsletter.
--Matt
Extended Callback Information
Project Contacts:
* Matt Benjamin <matt@linuxbox.com>
I have begun submitting XCB code upstream. The current status is that
Libosi and MCAS dependencies are submitted. MCAS has 2 parts, the first
of which (base contribution) has been committed, and the second part I
would expect to be committed some time this week. Libosi needs to be
broken up and re-sent to gerrit--this should happen by end-of-week.
Finally, the latest XCB implementation, implementing draft 10, should be
submitted for review by 8/10/2009.
--Matt (Ed: received on August 2, 2009)
Kerberos v5 and Multiple Encryption Types
Project Contacts:
* Matt Benjamin <matt@linuxbox.com>
* Marcus Watts <mwd@umich.edu>
Marcus is working on a protocol description for rxk5, to be published
fairly soon.
Better Documentation
Project Contacts:
* Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>
* Jason Edgecombe <jason@rampaginggeek.com>
There has not been major new documentation work since the last
newsletter, but we've been doing some work behind the scenes that should
eventually make it easier to manage and update the OpenAFS web site.
With the advent of Gerrit, we will also be emphasizing updating the
documentation at the same time as the code for new user-visible
features. --Russ
Simon Wilkinson has started a wiki page that documents the preferred
code style for new contributions. Previously, the coding style was
documented as a set of options to the GNU indent command. The new wiki
page is available at
<http://www.dementia.org/twiki/bin/view/AFSLore/CodingStyle>
Google Summer of Code 2009
OpenAFS received four slots for the 2009 Google Summer of Code.
Go to <http://socghop.appspot.com/org/home/google/gsoc2009/openafs> for
more information about the GSoC projects.
Three of the projects are still active. Unfortunately, one student had
to back out.
The following projects did not give a status update:
* Implementing OpenAFS Features into RedHat's kafs Kernel Module
OpenAFS Management Console on Windows
Student Developer: Brant Gurganus <brant@gurganus.name>
Mentor: Jeffrey Altman <jaltman@secure-endpoints.com>
Self-intro:
<https://lists.openafs.org/pipermail/openafs-devel/2009-April/016591.html>
There is now a 32-bit installer for people to try at
http://code.google.com/p/openafsclientmmc/downloads/list
OpenAFS Server Preference Based on Network Conditions
Student Developer: Jake Thebault-Spieker <summatusmentis@gmail.com>
Mentor: Derrick Brashear <shadow@gmail.com>
Self-intro:
<https://lists.openafs.org/pipermail/openafs-devel/2009-April/016590.html>
Projects with no progress or no update
* Disconnected AFS support
* Pthreaded Ubik
Resolved Tickets
Since Gerrit is now the preferred method of accepting patches instead of
RT, it's likely that fewer RT tickets will be filed.
Here is a list of tickets that have been resolved since July 1, 2009:
ticket # state created title
124938: resolved Jun 16, 2009 ubik "allbetter" log levels
124976: resolved Jun 23, 2009 fix for
tests-generate-dirpath-in-makefile
125001: resolved Jun 26, 2009 Linux: conditionally compile
search for key_type_keyring
125020: resolved Jun 29, 2009 Incorrect ubik_client
reinitialization in CallPreamble
125031: resolved Jul 01, 2009 Parallel make fixes
125064: resolved Jul 07, 2009 vos doesn't display vnode
accesses unless updateDate is set
125079: resolved Jul 09, 2009 OpenAFS 1.5.59 crash dump
125089: resolved Jul 12, 2009 Symbol find_task_by_vpid no
longer available to modules as of Linux 2.6.31
125093: resolved Jul 13, 2009 afsd_servivce.exe at 45% cpu and
explorer hangs.
125111: resolved Jul 16, 2009 vos listvol -format shows
incorrect volume name when busy
125152: resolved Jul 23, 2009 deal with gerrit 175 for windows