The discussions on this list have been immensely interesting to read/follow, and I thank you all for the help that has already been provided to me the few time's I've needed to query the list about certain issues.
Now I have a question about "best practices" to which I have not found a satisfactory answer in the Admin or User Guides. The Admin Guide [1] states the following about replicating home directories: > Replication is also not appropriate for volumes that change frequently. You > must issue the *vos release* command every time you need to update a > read-only volume to reflect changes in its read/write source. > > For both of these reasons, replication is appropriate only for popular > volumes whose contents do not change very often, such as system binaries and > other volumes mounted at the upper levels of your filespace. User volumes > usually exist only in a read/write version since they change so often. > [1] http://docs.openafs.org/AdminGuide/ch02s05.html#HDRWQ50 I would like to replicate home directories (and other AFS volumes that are primarily accessed read/write) for the purpose of faster disaster recovery in certain common cases, such as local hardware failure on an AFS File Server. I am planning to do this by always mounting these volumes with the "-rw" flag, then simply adding a replication site, and running a script that will "vos release" all these volumes every so often. At first, my concern was that perhaps "vos release" operations would have to copy the entire volume each time. However, during testing the first vos release took several minutes, and then subsequent vos release were significantly faster, appearing only to copy new/modified data. Does anyone have any more detail on how the vos release operation works? Is it actually differential? block-level or file-level? I can't think of any reason NOT to proceed with this... so if anyone who has tried this has any advice, it'd be much appreciated! -- Jonathan Nilsson, [email protected] Social Sciences Computing Services 949.824.1536, SSPA 4110, UC Irvine
