[OpenAFS] Re: Can "old release" clones be used?

Andrew Deason adeason@sinenomine.net
Wed, 16 Feb 2011 22:52:19 -0600


On Wed, 16 Feb 2011 21:58:07 -0600
"Ryan C. Underwood" <nemesis-lists@icequake.net> wrote:

> Is it possible to bring the "old release" volume online in the
> meantime or am I just screwed until I bring the RW server back and
> re-release?  I can't find any obvious way to clear the release flag
> manually.

You may be able to, but depending on when in the release process the
release was interrupted, the data in the volume could be very likely to
be inconsistent since vos could have been in the middle of restoring to
that volume.

The way to 'clear' the flag is to remove the site with 'vos remsite' and
add it back with 'vos addsite -valid'. Depending on the state of the
volume and how long it's been since the interrupted release ocurred,
that may or may not actually work. That is, if the fileserver can't
attach the volume because the volserver still has it or it looks
inconsistent or something, you won't be able to access stuff in the
volume no matter what the VLDB says.

If that doesn't work, the least error-prone way (and the way easiest to
describe) going forward I think is dumping the volume, to make sure you
don't lose the data. Once you have a volume dump you can try 'vos
restore'ing the dump (possibly under a different name, and then pointing
the mountpoint at the new volume), or 'vos convertROtoRW' the RO on the
server. If the volserver won't let you get at the volume, you can try
"bos restart fs"ing, or just killing the volserver process (bosserver
will restart it for you). Just make sure you aren't running any other
volume operations when you do that.

There's also a voldump utility that can create a volume dump directly
from the /vicepX on-disk structure without going through the volserver,
which should be a rather safe bet, but I don't think we ship that
program.

-- 
Andrew Deason
adeason@sinenomine.net