[OpenAFS] With 1.4.12, can /vicep partitions be plain directories?

[Russ Allbery]

Phillip Moore <w.phillip.moore@gmail.com> writes:

> I'm building some simple, automated test environments on VMs, where I
> really don't care about performance, just basic functionality and I was
> trying to be lazy and created by /vicep partitions with mkdir.

> When I went to create root.afs, the volserver did not like this:

> [root@fhcore etc]# vos create fhcore.boot.efs /vicepa root.afs -noauth
> vos : partition /vicepa does not exist on the server
> [root@fhcore etc]# ll -d /vicepa
> drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Sep 28 14:40 /vicepa
> [root@fhcore etc]# df /vicepa
> Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
> /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
>                       18187836   1779896  15469140  11% /

> Is it not possible to use plain old directories for the /vicep
> partitions?  Anecdotally, I was told they work, but I suspect there's
> some slight of hand required to use them.

You have to touch a file named AlwaysAttach in the /vicep* directory if it
isn't a separate device.  It's mentioned in the fileserver(8) man page,
but that man page is rather long and it's easy to miss.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>