Dear AFS admins,
When I introduce a new user to AFS,
the first thing they usually do is "ls /afs".
Then I have to explain why it takes a long time to complete.
This has always seemed "sub-optimal" to me.
So, I have found a pragmatic solution to this problem.
It is simple: instead of mounting all the foreign cells in root.afs,
I have created a new volume "root.othercells".
"root.othercells" has mountpoints for all the foreign cells
and is itself mounted at /afs/@cell/othercells/.
"root.afs" now only has a mountpoint for the local cell and
symbolic links to the foreign cell mounts in /afs/@cell/othercells/.
So, when a user does "ls /afs" the result is returned much more quickly.
Also, "cd /afs/$foreign_cell" still works as before.
It is also useful to be able to mount/unmount foreign cells in a
permanently mounted "root.othercells" volume instead of
having to make a temporary mountpoint for "root.afs"
each time for a mount/unmount (as in the traditional way).
The only disadvantage I have been able to think of in using
/afs/@cell/othercells/ is that any kind of recursive search
from /afs/@cell/ (eg find) may traverse "othercells" unless
you specifically exclude "othercells".
Thoughts?
--
cheers
paul http://acm.org/~mpb
85% Slashdot pure
Here is an example.
The cell is linux.ibm.com (see @cell symbolic link).
A foreign cell, hursley.ibm.com, is mounted in
/afs/linux.ibm.com/othercells/hursley.ibm.com
with a symbolic link at: /afs/hursley
[mpb@afs-linux-fs1 mpb]$ ls -ld /afs/@cell
lrwxr-xr-x 1 4000 root 13 Nov 30 1999 /afs/@cell ->
linux.ibm.com
[mpb@afs-linux-fs1 mpb]$ ls -ld /afs/linux.ibm.com
drwxrwxrwx 2 root root 2048 Jul 11 09:11
/afs/linux.ibm.com
[mpb@afs-linux-fs1 mpb]$ ls -ld /afs/hursley
lrwxr-xr-x 1 adminmpb root 45 Jun 29 12:38 /afs/hursley ->
/afs/linux.ibm.com/othercells/hursley.ibm.com
