[OpenAFS] OpenAFS Newsletter, Issue 5, September 2009
Jason Edgecombe
jason@rampaginggeek.com
Mon, 07 Sep 2009 12:28:16 -0400
Here is the September 2009 issue of the OpenAFS Newsletter. An HTML
version is available at
http://www.openafs.org/newsletter/newsletter-2009-09-volume001-issue05.html
OpenAFS Newsletter, Issue 5, September 2009
Welcome to the fifth 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
OpenAFS 1.5.62 was released on August 28, 2009. Highlights of this
release include several critical bugfixes and support for Mac OS X Snow
Leopard. 1.4.11 is still the recommended release for all Unix platforms,
including Snow Leopard. Testing of the 1.5.62 version on Unix platforms
is encouraged.
Russ Allbery gave an update on the progress of a non-profit organization
for OpenAFS. The Elders have decided that there are multiple issues,
including on-going funding, that make the formation of a non-profit
problematic at this time. In the interim, the Elders have voted
unanimously to approach the Software Freedom Conservancy and request
membership. The Elders will move forward with forming a foundation once
the economy picks up. For more information and some important details,
read Russ' announcement at:
<http://lists.openafs.org/pipermail/openafs-announce/2009/000303.html>
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
*BSD Support
Project Contacts:
* Matt Benjamin <matt@linuxbox.com>
I've been working on NetBSD client targeting master. I've sent a number
of changes, most committed, preparing for this. My plan is to have
something committed by the EU AFS Conference in Rome.
Extended Callback Information
Project Contacts:
* Matt Benjamin <matt@linuxbox.com>
The dependencies have begun to merge on the master branch (MCAS and all
changes are merged, miniosi is in review, XCB changesets will follow).
Kerberos v5 and Multiple Encryption Types
Project Contacts:
* Matt Benjamin <matt@linuxbox.com>
* Marcus Watts <mwd@umich.edu>
Marcus is preparing a draft paper describing the protocol and
implementation details. (I've read a draft.) It is planned to be
published in the next week or so. We began submitting split-out Rxk5
changesets, the gatekeepers want to put these on a work-in-process git
branch, more TBD.
--Matt (Ed: Received Sept 4, 2009)
Better Documentation
Project Contacts:
* Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>
* Jason Edgecombe <jason@rampaginggeek.com>
Jason updated sections 3.2 through 3.4 of chapter 2 in the Admin Guide.
Information about cross-realm trusts and foreign PTS users was included.
The instructions for submitting entries to the public CellServDB were
updated. Some text about using Freelance and Dynamic Root modes to find
foreign cells was added.
Demand-Attach FileServer (DAFS)
Project Contacts:
* Andrew Deason <adeason@sinenomine.net>
* Tom Keiser <tkeiser@sinenomine.net>
* Mike Meffie <mmeffie@sinenomine.net>
Only one or two DAFS issues remain that we believe are critical: 124484
(volumes not salvaged on first access from volserver), and possibly
124487 (fileserver/salvageserver lock up). 124487 may already be fixed
by a recently-merged patch for 124486 (fileserver hangs on shutdown), so
124484 may be the only remaining critical issue.
All other issues beyond those are either performance issues or are
relatively minor. Once they are fixed, we consider DAFS to be
production-ready, lacking any other issues. We can't fix issues we don't
know about, though, so testing DAFS is greatly appreciated. Even if it
may not appropriate for production in arbitrary critical environments
quite yet, DAFS is definitely usable in its current state if you want to
try it out.
If you are interested in trying out DAFS, Steven Jenkins has written up
how to get started with it here:
<http://blog.endpoint.com/2009/06/getting-started-with-demand-attach.html>
--Andrew
Userspace cache manager
Project Contact:
* Andrew Deason <adeason@sinenomine.net>
I have a working userspace unix OpenAFS client implemented via FUSE, and
perl bindings to libuafs (via SWIG). Neither are as fully-featured as
the kernel cache manager yet, but they are sufficient for simple
filesystem access, and can be used to simulate multiple clients from a
single machine.
The code is not in the main repository yet, as I need to clean up some
of the libuafs modifications, and make it play nice with the other users
of libuafs. If you want to mess around with them, though, feel free to
contact me.
Mac OS X OpenAFS Preference Pane
Project Contact:
* Claudio Bisegni <Claudio.Bisegni@lnf.infn.it>
The work done on the preference pane was directed to clean the code for
deprecated API's and adjustment for Snow Leopard. NSMenuExtra is a
private API that was never supported and has been changed to a
Background Only Application (AFSBackgrounder) that uses NSStatusItem to
show the OpenAFS lock icon on the OS X menu bar. The AFSBackgrounder is
also used to get a token at login time.
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 following projects did not give a status update:
* Implementing OpenAFS Features into RedHat's kafs Kernel Module
* OpenAFS Management Console on Windows
* OpenAFS Server Preference Based on Network Conditions
Projects with no progress or no update
* Disconnected AFS support
* Pthreaded Ubik
* Rx OSD integration & Raw Vicep Access in Clients
Resolved Tickets
Here is a list of tickets that have been resolved since August 1, 2009:
ticket # state created title
108199: resolved Jul 21, 2008 Incomplete file transfer : Bug Report
125211: resolved Aug 12, 2009 OpenAFS 1.5.61 says invalid cell
during install
125217: resolved Aug 13, 2009 OpenAFS configure script of the
source RPM doen't handle INIT_WORK_HAS_DATA macro correctly on SLES-11
125220: resolved Aug 13, 2009 Bug Report
125298: resolved Aug 28, 2009 find_task_by_vpid removed in
kernel 2.6.31
125301: resolved Aug 28, 2009 OpenAFS 1.5.62 version discrepancy