What, what about front ending the NetApp with a box that provides the
AFS functionality? In other words, the NetApp exports to Server X only
which serves AFS. How viable would this approach be?
Marcus Watts wrote:
Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2007 14:07:34 EDT
To: [email protected]
From: "Jesse W. Asher" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: [OpenAFS] How would AFS work with a NetApp box?
We're looking at implementing AFS and were wondering how AFS could be
used with out existing NetApp box? Anyone have any ideas on how this
could be done? Thanks!!
I believe you have 2 choices:
/1/ find (or finish) a version of openafs that will export a local
filesystem (there are rumours...). You will sacrifice afs acls.
You should have something that will allow you to share files with
other netapp users, at least in some form. If other netapp users have
r/w access, there may be some security concerns that you should think
carefully about. You probably would not want to make this a major part
of your AFS world.
/2/ implement a version of openafs that will work on top of something
that lives on the netapp server. A very crude approach would be to mount
a loopback filesystem on top of a big file on the netapp. A more
finicky approach would be to use the namei server on top of the netapp (there
may be minor technical problems that stop this from being merely trivial.)
Yet another approach would be iSCSI, in which case AFS basically won't care.
Any of these approachs should give you something very like a regular
AFS server, except more expensive. You won't want the underlying disk
space to be directly accessible to anything else.
-Marcus Watts
