This is the situation for KTH, one of the Transarc customers that
has been a site license customers for a long time.
KTH's AFS license says its for "All machine types currently supported
by AFS". After KTH asked IBM why that did not include Linux, the
answer was that "currently" should be interpreted as the day of the
contract. Today, Transarc does not ship any binaries for Ultrix on VAX
(just to mention one obsolete example) which was currently supported
at the time of the contract writing. By this interpretation it is
possible to diminish service over time without reducing maintainance
cost for the customer. The departments at KTH who are using AFS are
not happy about this one product one vendor situation and are doing
something about it. One of the alternatives is to support the Arla
project.
The subject was about 2.2.16. I wanted to install 2.2.16, but to be
able to run the Transarc client, I had to install 2.2.14. The result
were problems with the 3.6 AFS client freezing the box totally after
about 3 days. I changed to Arla-current and it has been working for 8
days now. Should I have bothered with the Transarc client at all or
should I have started with 2.2.16 and Arla right away? The box is
running a userspace NFS daemon to offer read only access to AFS for
the less talented OSes (Cray Unicos 10, Fujitsu UXP/V) which never
will see any native AFS of any form. 8 days is not a long time, but I
have workstations with Linux 2.2.14, an uptime > 100 days and an Arla
uptime > 20 days (when I last upgraded Arla).
Harald.
