On Saturday, December 03, 2005 05:51:57 PM -0800 Adam Megacz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:


Please forgive me if I misunderstand this; I come at the AFS thing
more from the protocol/programming angle than the IT professional /
storage administrator angle.  Specifically, I know much less about the
actual OpenAFS code than the protocol it implements.

It seems that OpenAFS insists that an AFS volume be served from the
mount point of a physical OS-level partition.  In other words, if I
mount some filesystem on /foo, I can't serve AFS files out of
/foo/bar/vicepa -- AFS wants to own the entire partition.

Is this correct?  If so, what is the reason for this restriction?  If
the reason is performance, is that the *only* reason (ie could this
restriction be lifted if performance were not a concern)?

There are two issues...

- Fileserver partitions aren't configured; the fileserver uses whatever
 /vicep* it can find.  So, it has to have a name there or the fileserver
 won't find it.  As others have pointed out, a symlink will work fine.

- With the inode-based fileserver, it is safe to put non-AFS files in
 a vice partition, but having multiple /vicep* on the same physical
 filesystem would be bad, and could well lead to filesystem corruption
 (not so much during operation as during a salvage).  So, it just won't
 let you do that.  With a namei server, there is no such concern, and
 you can create /vicepx/AlwaysAttach and the partition will be attached
 even though it is not a filesystem root.

-- Jeffrey T. Hutzelman (N3NHS) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
  Sr. Research Systems Programmer
  School of Computer Science - Research Computing Facility
  Carnegie Mellon University - Pittsburgh, PA

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