[OpenAFS-port-darwin] My Ramblings was--Re: Many crashes on OS X 10.3 - MP problem?

Ragnar Sundblad ragge@nada.kth.se
Mon, 16 Feb 2004 21:48:49 +0100


--On den 16 februari 2004 12:24 -0500 Gedaliah Wolosh <gwolosh@njit.edu>=20
wrote:

>> Typically all kinds of applications hangs or at least gets
>> inresponsive when your tokens expire - are you sure this is
>> not the problem you see?
>
> Could be.  Also changing networks have caused this problem.

Yes, it typically has to timeout the servers. (It could be
more intelligent doing this, but on the other hand you don't
want it to timeout immediately just because you have kicked
out the cable, you want to be able to put it back before
every AFS access starts to fail. A dialog telling what happened
with interaction that lets the use tell what she wants to do
could be one solution.)

> The situation is different now. Previously AFS as a commercial venture
> needed to integrate with the operating systems entrenched in academia.
> Now that AFS is entrenched in academia, Apple must see to it that they
> can integrate with AFS. In my opinion, the onus is on Apple.

OK, that is one way to look at it. I'd of course rather see that
they support AFS instead of SMB which I don't use, but that is
me. :-)

> I could be wrong but I don't think the login window uses pam.

I can't find it in any documentation, but I think I have heard
it somewhere, and there is a "system.login.pam" key in
/etc/authorization. Sorry, I have no more info.
"Use the source". :-)

>> We have home directories for all our 12K users in AFS. We have
>> some links for some app caches up in /tmp that we establish
>> at login time. Most things work really good.
>> Portable use is another issue, but that is an AFS "problem",
>> not an Mac OS X problem.
>>
>
> Good to know...

I should have mentioned that we just use their ordinary unix
home directories, and with 12K I meant 12 k or 12000. :-)
We have had to crank up the quota for people a bit, otherwise
it works quite good.

> If it is trivial, then even more so Apple should look at it.

Yes, from what I know from talking to the Apple file system guys=B4
they would probable fix this in no time (if the problem is as
small as I hope).

>  And after
> they solve it publicize it.  It looks good for them and is helpful to
> us.

We need to convince some management people that this is worth it,
they obviously haven't understood that yet. :-)

I have a few of those DTS support request things that cost money
and that I never use, I wonder how much work you could ask of
them in one support request, and how little knowledge from
the requestor they will accept. :-)

/ragge