[OpenAFS] Shutdown/startup of entire cell

[Thomas Kula]

On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 10:50:27PM -0500, Garance A Drosihn wrote:
> Hi.
> 
> Due to circumstances way beyond my control (a major network
> upgrade), I am going to need to shutdown our entire AFS cell
> this Saturday.  So, tha is less than 36 hours from now.

Others have addressed the proper order for shutting down AFS 
servers well, so I won't touch on them. 

I will point out that when I was at UMich we ensured that all
of our AFS fileservers were restarted at least once a year. 
I did advocate for emptying fileservers before doing that, 
although that never took hold, for various reasons, but with 
modern hardware it wasn't too onerous of a process. The bulk
of the time was "waiting for callbacks to be broken".

We did this so that we knew that a fileserver would properly
restart --- after a while, you've upgraded various things,
fixed stuff, etc., and it was good to have a sanity check
that nothing creeped in during that time. And, with Murphy
around, you know that at some point your fileserver was
going to get its power cord yanked, be the victim of hitting
the wrong power switch, etc. It was nice to know that in 
that case, things would just come back when power was restored,
and if something had creeped in over the course of the year,
it was nice that it happened when a couple sysadmins where
in the office, well-rested and well-caffeinated and ready
to handle weird problems, rather than getting a bleary-eyed
sleepy beep at 3am....

-- 
Thomas L. Kula | kula@tproa.net | http://kula.tproa.net/