Hi Mike.
I'd like to put in some $0.02 worth since I'm running a large
NFS/automount based system myself and I'm currently planning to convert
to AFS (or DFS)
I don't grasp your situation totally.
How do you manage to create over 565 mount points in a system where you
have only 165 workstations??
I can think of two situations:
1) You're using many workstations as both NFS servers and clients
producing many small partitions that all the other machines mount
via the automounter.
2) You have many users where you automount their home directories,
and on some machines you mount them all (a compute or mail server
typically).
If you have the situation 1) , I think you're in deep trouble. You
probably will have to reorganize the whole system and make the
workstations as dataless as possible. Just *using* AFS won't help, since
AFS will force you to do this reorganization anyway.
AFS (and NFS too originally) is built on the concept of dedicated file
servers.
You could remedy your situation by dedicating a few machines as file
servers and coalesce the various file systems to a smaller number of
large partitions on the file servers, and continue using NFS.
However, AFS will probably help you more anyway since you can have more
clients/server in AFS than NFS. AFS will also give you easier
administration, and when/if your system grows, you'll sooner or later
need something more secure than NFS.
The situation 2, is more comfortable, and deploying AFS will probably
help you out.
If you do this you'll have to get rid of home directory mounts by moving
(and thus renaming) the home directories into AFS. This is probably
painful to you or your users, but in the long run probably the best
thing to do.
You could also provide a secondary path to the home directories using a
directory with many symlinks (or using the automounter(!) which might
work on Solaris 1 since it uses symlinks locally and not loopback
mounts) This secondary path will have to maintained though, which you
probably don't want to do in the long run.
Greetings & Merry Xmas from the snowy Sweden
Chris.
--------------------------------------------------
Christer Bern�rus E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
UNIX Systems Manager Phone: +46 31 7721036
Chalmers U. of Technology Fax: +46 31 165655
Department of Computing Science Ham radio: SM6FBQ, Loc: JO67BQ
S-412 96 Gothenburg, SWEDEN 144.050 T, 144.027 EME
