[OpenAFS-win32-devel] Experiences with new AFS releases

[Christopher D. Clausen]

Ted Anderson <ota@surfvi.com> wrote:
> Next I figured I should try the latest stable release: 1.4.2a.
> However, I was not able to get it to work at all with my home cell.
> I did have some results with a different AFS cell on the same VPN and
> was also able to access /afs/openafs.org.  I don't know what is
> different about my home cell, but all attempts to access it lead to
> hangs and I could not stop the OpenAFS Client Service.  It required
> an uninstall and an extra reboot to clean it off my system.

If you ever downgrade from a higher version number to a lower one, its 
best to do an uninstall, reboot, and then install the older version. 
Upgrades to older versions don't always work and sometimes fail 
completely causing various weird file versioning issues.

Did you happen to note any unusual messages logged server-side?

> event log contained many AFS messages during startup, several of
> which mentioned KfW.  I do not have this package installed, so
> perhaps the logic to handle the case where it is unavailable is not
> working.

Also, as per the Release Notes:
"MIT Kerberos for Windows 2.6.x or 3.x.x if Kerberos 5 authentication 
support is desired."  Which means that no Kerberos 5 stuff will work 
without KfW.

> I can provide excerpts from EventLog, output from the tests I ran or
> other details about my system or environment.  Let me know what would
> be helpful.

I'd say to stop the AFS client and delete the AFSCache file, just in 
case it got hosed by something else and may have data in it that is 
corrupting your tests.

The event log isn't terribly useful.  Usually, the best things to help 
find problems are to turn on tracing:
fs trace -on
and then when you get a hang, run
fs trace -dump
This should produce several logs and dump file in the SYSTEM %TEMP% 
directory, usually C:\WINDOWS\TEMP

(If you run the DEBUG builds, tracing is turned on by default and I 
believe additional symbols are installed that may help with debugging.)

There are futher details in the Release Notes on using SysInternal's 
utils to debug problems and get logs that can be used to track down 
problems.  And there is info on ioctl debugging.  The developers may 
request that you use one of these methods to further debug the issue.

You should then put these log and dump files somewhere where the 
developers can get to them, either on a website, in AFS space, or as 
attachments and send an email detailing the problem to 
openafs-bugs@openafs.org  (and DO NOT CC these lists with bug reports, 
but it doesn't hurt to send a seperate email to openafs-info to let 
others know what to test out.)  Its useful to send the AFS server 
versions that you are teseting against as well.

Also, Altman would probably tell you that this message doesn't belong on 
the win32-devel list.  The devel list is for discussing future 
development, not fixing bugs in a current release.  Just use 
openafs-info for that so that more people see your reports.

<<CDC
-- 
Christopher D. Clausen
ACM@UIUC SysAdmin