[OpenAFS] OpenAFS server on windows- is it possible for it to survive a restart?

[Julian Rendell]

Hi-

I'd like to try OpenAFS on a couple of Windows machines (one server, several clients) - primarily to take advantage of it's client side caching & higher-than-cifs network thru-put... this is to try and make a distributed build system workable.  (Currently windows file sharing is giving *terrible* performance, even on a dedicated gigabit ethernet between two machines- only marginally faster than 100 meg ethernet.  Less than 1Mb/sec on average (we have lots and lots of little files.))

I can install the server, configure it, and even use it.  In cursory tests it appears to be performing very, very well- very promising.

However, as soon as the server machine is rebooted, all the OpenAFS services start crashing (nothing much in the logs)- repeatedly, during startup.  That's the end- have to remove and reinstall.  All volumes etc seem to get corrupted.

Unfortunately, trying with a *nix server isn't an option at this point in time.

A couple of notes:
-the machine has two network adapters
-the host name != dns entry for that ip address (dhcp issue.)

I've read the later can cause problems, but I can't find absolute confirmation.  I've also tried editing the hosts file, so DNS isn't used to resolve that address.... but I've read OpenAFS doesn't use the hosts file...
I've even tried reinstalling/rebooting with the extra ethernet card disabled- still no luck.

Does anyone think it's worth re-trying with host name=dns entry?  (May be possible to arrange)

Any other suggestions?  A little off-topic, but does anyone know of anything other than OpenAFS that's very cheap/free and faster than cifs? (Windows cluster FSs seem to be very expensive.)  I've tried NFS, both third party and MSs Unix services- a cheap/trial third party server seemed very fast, but very unreliable; Unix services was no faster than built in CIFS.  More off topic: Anyone else seen this kind of problem with CIFS and have any suggestions?  (I've tweaked what registry settings I can find documentation for, so far to little difference in thru-put.)  I've got a reasonable background understanding of things, but I'm not to familiar with configuring windows for FS performance...

Thanks in advance-

Julian