Jeffrey Altman wrote:
Coy Hile wrote:
On Sat, 15 Mar 2008, Jason Edgecombe wrote:
BTW, all of this is for the client. Nobody has tried to run a
fileserver on an N8X0...yet. ;)
Give Brashear time :)
In all seriousness:
The real issue with running AFS Servers on a mobile device
such as the N8xx is the transient nature of its network
connectivity and the likelihood that it will move from network
address to network address.
Similar to the work that has been done over the last two years
to permit mobile clients we need to define alternative mechanisms
for clients to be able to locate servers and for servers to be
able to register their locations. Instead of tracking servers
by IP address as is done today clients will need to start tracking
servers by UUID. The volume location database will resolve volumes
to servers by UUID as well as their last known address.
We then need a mechanism for registering UUID to address mappings
and I'm not sure that Dynamic DNS or Bonjour are the methods
we want to rely upon. We might want to deploy our own server location
service that performs the mapping of {cell,UUID} to IP address.
There is absolutely a nice research project for someone to work on here.
I welcome any improvements such as this. In the mean time, I could see
some purpose of running a fileserver on a mobile device if it stays in
one place for a while. This might be useful for conferences or local
gatherings of people and demonstrating openafs, but probably not for
full-time production data.
What are the plans for mobile fileservers, if any? Are we assuming
stable & static cell/DB servers or more ad-hoc models? With an ad-hoc
model how would you decide to trust the server when there is no
authoritative DNS available? Is there a plan for some type of PKI-like
model where a server can prove it's identity when it's address changes
and the cell servers aren't static or aren't available.
Jason
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