[OpenAFS] OpenAFS Newsletter, Issue 6, October 2009

Jason Edgecombe jason@rampaginggeek.com
Thu, 15 Oct 2009 19:05:10 -0400


Here is the October 2009 issue of the OpenAFS Newsletter. An HTML 
version is available at
http://www.openafs.org/newsletter/newsletter-2009-10-volume001-issue06.html


OpenAFS Newsletter, Issue 6, October 2009
    Welcome to the sixth 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.

    The current and past issues of this newsletter are available at
    <http://www.openafs.org/newsletter/>

  General OpenAFS Progress
    There were three OpenAFS 1.5.x releases since the last newsletter.
    OpenAFS 1.5.65 was released on October 6, 2009. Highlights of this
    release include several important bug fixes. All of the existing
    compile-time warnings have been silenced, but they may be re-enabled
    with a ./configure option. This was done to help prevent new warnings
    from creeping into the code. The configure option can be used for those
    developers trying to clean up the older warnings.

    There was some discussion of allowing one or two hyphens to specify
    command-line options. Michael Meffie supplied a patch to allow this and
    it was approved. This feature will be included in a future release.

    The OpenAFS web site is now using git for source control, and the older
    CVS repository for the web site has been disabled.

    Jeff Altman and Derrick Brashear gave a status update on OpenAFS
    progress at the European AFS Meeting. Your File System Inc. has
    committed to working on several improvements to OpenAFS and contributing
    them back to OpenAFS. There is more information in the Jeff & Derrick's
    slides at <http://www.dia.uniroma3.it/~afscon09/docs/part1.pdf> and
    <http://www.dia.uniroma3.it/~afscon09/docs/part3.pdf>. There is an
    updated road map at <http://www.openafs.org/roadmap.html>.

    There is some discussion about getting rid of the AFS lock icon in the
    Windows system tray for future versions of AFS. A few people value the
    clear indication that the lock icon gives for being logged in. Please
    join in the discussion on the openafs-info mailing list.

  Events
   AFS Hackathon
    On September 22-24, an AFS Hackathon was held at The School of
    Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Simon Wilkinson posted a
    summary on the openafs-devel and afs3-standardization mailing lists. The
    summary is available at
    
<https://lists.openafs.org/pipermail/openafs-devel/2009-October/017096.html>

    The jabber chat logs of the Hackathon are available at
    <http://conference.openafs.org/hackathon@conference.openafs.org/>

   European AFS Meeting
    The Second Annual European AFS Workshop was held at Roma Tre University,
    Italy, on September 28-30, 2009.

    Ref: <http://www.dia.uniroma3.it/~afscon09/>

    The attendance of the event remained stable at about 50 people from 6
    countries, including two colleagues from Pilsen, Czech Republic. There
    was an introductory day, a day dealing with advanced topics, and a final
    half-day dedicated mainly to site reports. Social activities consisted
    of a sponsored bus tour through Rome (Sun Microsystems), a sponsored
    visit to St Paul's Basilica (DIA Roma Tre), the second largest cathedral
    after St. Peter's, and two dinners in typical Roman restaurants, where
    the attendants proudly consumed more wine than water.

    Thanks to INFN, this year Jeffrey Altman and Derrick Brashear were again
    the invited guests, and Hartmut Reuter provided a detailed tutorial on
    the combination of AFS with object storage. The slides of all talks are
    available on the website, and the event was transmitted in real-time
    streaming, provided by ENEA. Recordings can be freely accessed over the
    web.

    This workshop was a joint effort of the Department of Informatics and
    Automation from Roma Tre University, and three research institutions:
    CASPUR, ENEA, INFN. Two industrial sponsors contributed: E4 company and
    Sun Microsystems.

    The next year's conference will be hosted either in Pilsen, Czech
    Republic, or Hamburg, Germany.

    --Wolfgang Alexander Gehrke

   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
   AFS Protocol Standardization
    There is some progress in afs3-standardization. There are new protocol
    descriptions for rxgk, rxk5, and Rx/OSD that were published in advance
    of the hackathon, I just submitted a proposal for SRV records for AFS,
    and I think there was an extended callback draft published as well.

    --Russ Allbery

    Current active protocol drafts:

    *   AFS Callback Extensions

        <http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-benjamin-extendedcallbackinfo-00.txt>

    *   DNS SRV Resource Records for AFS

        <http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-allbery-afs-srv-records-01.txt>

   Demand-Attach FileServer (DAFS)
    Project Contacts:

    *   Andrew Deason <adeason@sinenomine.net>

    *   Tom Keiser <tkeiser@sinenomine.net>

    *   Mike Meffie <mmeffie@sinenomine.net>

    A fix for 124484 (volumes not salvaged on first access from volserver)
    is nearing completion, and should see public review soon. 124484 may be
    the last critical DAFS bug; we are currently trying to reproduce
    earlier-seen problems with the newest patches to see if they still
    exist.

    We are also working on improved developer documentation for DAFS, as it
    has been noted that a lack of a broad overview for the changes DAFS
    brings (specifically in the volume package) has made contributions and
    review prohibitively difficult for newcomers to DAFS code.

    --Andrew

   Mac OS X OpenAFS Preference Pane
    Project Contact:

    *   Claudio Bisegni <Claudio.Bisegni@lnf.infn.it>

    The MacOSX Preference Pane has been updated to use the launchd start
    mode. StartupItems has been replaced by the launchd technology. The
    behavior of the OpenAFS service at start-up can be managed from the
    Preference Pane. Both the launchd daemon and the preference pane use the
    /Library/OpenAFS/Tools/root.client/usr/vice/etc/afs.rc file to start or
    stop OpenAFS.

   Extended Callback Information
    Project Contacts:

    *   Matt Benjamin <matt@linuxbox.com>

    XCB was discussed at Edinburgh, and at the request of the group, a new
    I-D draft was published, removing mention of asynchronous delivery. That
    feature will be revisited in future. The XCB draft is under last call,
    and interested parties are requested to review the draft and send
    comments or indication of "support" or "not support" to the
    afs3-standardization list.

    A draft document of the protocol changes is available at
    <http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-benjamin-extendedcallbackinfo-00.txt>.

   *BSD Support
    Project Contacts:

    *   Matt Benjamin <matt@linuxbox.com>

    I am gradually sending changes indirectly related to NetBSD cache
    manager port. The most recent are related to AFS_PROC and AFS_UCRED.

   Kerberos v5 and multiple encryption types
    Project Contacts:

    *   Matt Benjamin <matt@linuxbox.com>

    *   Marcus Watts <mwd@umich.edu>

    Marcus have a presentation at the European AFS Meeting
    <http://www.dia.uniroma3.it/~afscon09/docs/watts.pdf>

   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.

    The Google Summer of code is over for this year. The code from the three
    active GSoC projects is available at
    
<http://code.google.com/p/google-summer-of-code-2009-openafs/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>

    The server preferences project has implemented code for the Windows
    platform to rank servers based on packet round-trip time which is
    currently available in gerrit. Using throughput as well will have
    updated code in gerrit soon (although this is still a work in progress).

    Upon getting code that seems reasonable for the Windows platform, the
    Unix port should be a matter of re-implementing the code, but not
    changing too much. I hope to have the unix port completed within a
    month, time-allowing.

    --Jake

    Even though the Google Summer of code has ended, Jake will continue
    working on the project until completion. He is still working within the
    original specifications of the project.

    A presentation about Jake's work was given at the European AFS Workshop
    <http://www.dia.uniroma3.it/~afscon09/docs/part2.pdf>.

    --Ed.

   Projects with no progress or no update
    *   Disconnected AFS support

    *   Pthreaded Ubik

    *   Rx OSD integration & Raw Vicep Access in Clients

    *   Userspace cache manager

    *   Better Documentation

  Resolved Tickets
    Here is a list of tickets that have been resolved since September 1,
    2009:

      ticket # state     created       title
         1187: resolved  Oct 31, 2002  rxgen features
       124990: resolved  Jun 25, 2009  addition of 
doc/arch/dafs-vnode-fsa.dot
       125099: resolved  Jul 14, 2009  1.4.11 ../configure; make fails
       125101: resolved  Jul 15, 2009  ubik_VL_GetEntryByIDN not attempted
       125151: resolved  Jul 23, 2009  make clean issue on OSX
       125158: resolved  Jul 24, 2009  Re: getcwd() returns invalid 
working directory in chroot environment
       125226: resolved  Aug 14, 2009  ktc_curpag deactivated for non 
Kerberos environment -> breaks pam_afs.so
       125285: resolved  Aug 26, 2009  afs global lock not held
       125342: resolved  Sep 01, 2009  Mac OS 1.4 and 1.5 clients fail 
with huge root [=cache] partition sizes
       125351: resolved  Sep 02, 2009  Bug Report: windows client 
flooding fileserver
       125355: resolved  Sep 03, 2009  missing init causes erratic 
results using the client's "hard mount" functionality
       125388: resolved  Sep 09, 2009  OpenAFS 1.5.50 on Windows clients 
can DoS an openafs cell
       125389: resolved  Sep 10, 2009  Integrated login failed: Unknown 
code KTC2 on windows 1.5.6204
       125391: resolved  Sep 11, 2009  windows 64-bit 1.5.63 msi 
installer is corrupt