[OpenAFS] Trying to use OpenAFS-1.5.xx with Linux

[Simon Wilkinson]

Hi,

I've just got back online, and I'm going to try to reply to all of this =
in one message. Apologies if the attribution ends up being a little =
confused.

Dale Pontius wrote:

> To be truthful, I'm not even THAT interested in disconnected mode.  =
I'm
> more interested in the ability to "hold things over" while =
disconnected,
> so I can reconnect.

I suspect you do need disconnected for this - either that, or changes =
which mean that the filesystem never returns control when the network =
goes away (and for some, multithreaded, applications, this will probably =
have other issues).

As I see it, your use case is:
A) Start applications with data/configuration files stored in AFS
B) Disconnect from network and suspend machine
C) Walk down corridor
D) Reconnect to network
E) Continue working with applications as if nothing had happened.

The problem today is that if C takes you a while, and the applications =
were in the middle of doing something when you disconnected, AFS will =
time out the file operations, and your applications will complain. So, =
you either need to allow applications to continue to access files while =
the network is down (hence disconnected), or to block all file access =
indefinitely whilst there is no network (which is a touch anti-social)

> Today I'd have to take down the afs 1.4.x client if
> I were about to lose my network connection, and that would mean taking
> down my desktop session and all applications - just to suspend.

Why do you need to take down the client? You should be able to start and =
stop the network under AFS without any major issues.

> Next I figured I'd grab a token for root, using my afsid as
> "-principal", and I'm reconnected.  What seems odd here is that at =
first
> root didn't need a token to reconnect, now it does.

There's a couple of potential explanations here. Firstly, if your login =
session is in a PAG, and you use 'su' or 'sudo' to become root, then =
root will inherit your tokens. You can verify this by running the =
'tokens' command. Secondly, we only need tokens to reconnect when you =
have changes to send to the server. If there are no local changes, then =
reconnection will succeed without any authentication.

> Another observation.  On my previous testing, some mount points were
> missing, along with all of their data.  This time those mount points =
are
> present - mostly.  My data seems to be all present, with the exception
> of some "holes".  The overt symptom is that I have a symlink, and if =
you
> try "ls -l" on the parent directory to look at that symlink you get
> "linkname -> " with the target showing up as blank.  I can go to =
another
> afs client and find that target of that symlink.  Back on the 1.5.72
> client, in some cases I can go directly to the target of the symlink =
and
> see that the data is present.  But in some (currently one, but not
> exhaustive testing) I go directly to the symlink target, and the data =
is
> missing.  In this one case, the missing data shares a volume with =
other
> data that is properly present.

As others have pointed out, the only data that is made available to you =
whilst you are offline is that which you held a valid callback for when =
you disconnected. These are typically files which
a) Have been accessed recently
b) Have not been modified by other clients
c) Are not hosted on a server which is flushing its callback list

Cases which are not repeatable (such as your comments about ls -l either =
side of disconnection not yielding reproducable results) are likely to =
be down to one of these 3 factors.=20

In addition, in order to be able to open() a file whilst disconnected, =
all of its chunks must be available in the disk cache. This typically =
means that the client must have read the entire file. There are also =
some further gotchas with the fact that the object containing the =
directory, as well as each file within it, must be in the cache.=20

I populate my disk cache with:
find . -type f | xargs cat > /dev/null

As Jeffrey said, we're planning on implementing a user interface which =
will allow you to designate 'pinned' files which will always be =
available whilst disconnected.

>=20
> Is this helping at all?

It's hugely helpful - the more use disconnected gets, the better!

Cheers,

Simon.