Hi Gentoo Devs-
Thank you to Martin MOKREJÅ and the others who contributed to the recent
thread on new openafs ebuilds. I've been using my own ebuilds (they're ugly
and I doubt that anyone in the Gentoo dev-team would be interested in them,
but if someone's interested I'd be glad to share) with OpenAFS for about a
year now and have been using OAFS with linux for maybe two years. OAFS has a
great deal to offer and I'm glad to see somebody working on improving the
support in Gentoo for OAFS.
But I'm writing today to get some pointers on the subject of keeping various
portage directories
(/usr/portage, /usr/portage/packages, /usr/portage/distfiles, etc.) on afs
volumes.
I've been experimenting with this notion for a month or so and seem to be
having no notable problems to speak of thus far, but I wonder if someone more
expert in Gentoo than me and also familiar with OAFS could offer any
comments.
In my experiments, I have an afs volume called portage in the afs tree and I
make a symlink in all the networked machines' local filesystems
at /usr/portage that points to this volume. I have another afs volume called
distfiles and there is a 'distfiles' symlink in the portage volume that
points to it. I have also set PKGDIR to /usr/packages and
symlinked /usr/packages to another afs volume. OAFS docs describe what seems
to me to be a reasonably good system for storing system binaries on afs
volumes with a general tree structure like this:
/afs
/afs/cell.name
/afs/cell.name/i386_linux24/usr/afsws/{bin,lib}
/afs/cell.name/i386_linux26/usr/afsws/{bin,lib}
/afs/cell.name/ppc_linux26/usr/afsws/{bin,lib}
and so on, and then making symlinks in the local fs to these volumes. I'm
just trying to extend this notion to Gentoo.
I made afs volumes under each of these architecture/linux-kernel trees called
arch.kernel.packages. Then, going to each machine in the network, made
symlinks from /usr/packages to the appropriate afs volume.
This system seems to work for me pretty well, but I wonder if there are subtle
issues that I'm overlooking that should be addressed. One issue that I have
thought a little about is keeping readonly access to the afs volumes that all
the machines need and obtaining write access to the appropriate afs volumes
whenever running an emerge --sync or emerging a package or making a quickpkg
out of an installed package. I have a scheme in place that works, but I'm
sure there are many things I've overlooked with it.
Does anyone have any thoughts to share on:
a) general advisability of this (seems like a good thing to me---lots of
savings on space across machines, oafs has a good authentication system in
kerberos, seems better to me than running a local rsync server alone and also
better in at least some ways than NFS, etc),
b) what special considerations I should keep in mind with such a scheme,
c) security,
d) general reading material to help me think about a-c better.
TIA.
--
Kevin
http://www.gnosys.us
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