[OpenAFS] Decentralized failover/backup system for RW volumes

[Prunk Dump]

2018-04-04 11:10 GMT+02:00 Lars Schimmer <l.schimmer@cgv.tugraz.at>:
> On 04/04/18 10:10, Prunk Dump wrote:
>> Hi OpenAFS Team !
>
> Hi from a (still) OpenAFS admin.
>
>> I'm currently administering a high-school networks with 5 Samba PDC
>> and around 150 Linux et 300 Windows clients. To build my user's shares
>> I use simultaneously Samba DFS and NFSv4 ( with referrals ). So I have
>> a global namespace for my windows and Linux clients but I need to
>> manages all my volumes manually to distribute the load on the servers
>> and making redundancy with rsync.
>>
>> I will be shortly upgrading all my servers. So I have started
>> investigating on new solutions. And AFS seems to fit nearly all my
>> needs ! Just a point is still problematic.
>
> First: keep in mind, the OpenAFS Windows client is old and unmaintained
> currently. Needs more work to keep it current and updated with latest
> OpenAFS 1.8.x
> An alternate implementation is Auristor, but that is a commercial suite.

Thank you very much for your help !

That's very sad ... As I can't have only Linux stations I absolutely
need a reliable Windows client for my network file system. And it is
not acceptable for me to use a closed source client. This is really
frustrating as more I read the AFS documentation more I find that it
fit perfectly the needs for a local network parallelized file system.
And I have made some tests linking AFS to a Samba Active Directory for
Kerberos security and it works perfectly for Linux servers and clients
! (once AES encryption is enabled on AFS)

There is also another problem. As I use Samba Active Directory for
security, it seems that the current AFS windows clients don't use the
Kerberos ticket obtained at logon to obtain the AFS token. So there is
two Kerberos authentication at logon instead of one.

But I like the fact that we know, in AFS, where the volumes are
stored. This is not the case in some other file systems like
glusterFS. So I can potentially do some optimizations with AFS. For
example I know that all the students on a same class will mount their
home share at the same time. So to load balance my servers I just need
to distribute each class home shares between my 5 servers.

And actually, Samba domain DFS support is not fully supported and
NFSv4 pNFS feature is still in development ...

Maybe is to too early to update my network design.

Thanks again !

Baptiste.