Several people commented on my "administrative hassle" assertion.
Primarily, this was based on the fact that with Steve's desired configuration, he would end up with each machine in his cluster being a critical point of failure (albeit a less critical point of failure than a single NFS server), and thus each machine will require some significant management, and if a single machine has a hardware failure, then something has to be done about it sooner rather than later. Compare this to a system with ten terminal servers and a pair of clustered file servers. When one of the ten terminal servers dies, the load balancer steve mentioned will notice, and distribute the load to the other nine machines. since these are all identical machines, this is easy, and the machine can be repaired at the convenience of the administrator. If we look at the likelihood of any single machine having a hardware failure, we realize that by increasing our critical points of failure, we are significantly increasing the likelihood of a failure that the administrator will have to actually do something about in real-time. We can protect against that by buying more expensive server-class hardware for *all* the machines, at significant cost (say $3000 for a decent server vs. $1500 for something with consumer-grade parts). Or, we could take that extra money, and spend it on a robust central server cluster. If we are talking two terminal server machines it may not make sense. If we are talking ten terminal server machines, it almost certainly does. Additionally, distributing user volumes across a dozen file servers would require administration - juggling volumes across file servers when one gets too full, etc. Sticking with a big server or would require significantly less. Nathan Rawling commented on the ease of managing AFS vs. NFS - he is certainly right that once it is running AFS has a lot of manageability plusses. However, that comes with some significant overhead that we in the AFS admin community tend to accept, and forget about. I get the impression that Steve is intending to send out a preconfigured CD set for admins at schools to load on their clusters. This suggests that the end admin needs to have the simplest possible configuration. I posit that a single (or clustered) (probably NFS) file server would more likely provide that. steve, I would love to hear more about who the consumers of your project will be. It sounds interesting. danno dan pritts [EMAIL PROTECTED] systems administrator 734/352-4953 office internet2 734/546-4423 mobile _______________________________________________ OpenAFS-info mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.openafs.org/mailman/listinfo/openafs-info
