[OpenAFS] OpenAFS in LTSP environment

[Joerg Herzinger]

I've been using OpenAFS now for three years and I am really impressed by=20
its possibilities and performance. Now I am in a new company with about=20
40 clients all running LTSP. We are still using NFS for our users homes=20
and shared directories and it slowly gets a real pain in the ass. I am=20
really missing ACLs, useful quotas the possibility to make everything=20
publicly available.
Now my Problem/thoughts are that one of the great things about OpenAFS=20
is the cache. It heavily reduces disk writes on the server, which is=20
currently our main problem. Now with LTSP this could become very=20
interesting, because since most applications are run on one server disk=20
IO could again be the bottleneck. There are just some applications like=20
Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice.org that are run on the local=20
machines with their own OpenAFS client and could really take advantage=20
of the cache.
One thought that came to me would be using a ramfs as cache. Would that=20
be possible??
I hoped to get some input about that topic here. What are your thoughts=20
about that? OpenAFS definitely has some huge advantages over NFS, but I=20
am really concerned that it won't work out that good with LTSP.

so long,
    J=F6rg