On 07/14/2010 01:43 PM, Jonathan Nilsson wrote:
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.
Others have offered good advice based on their years of experience that should be helpful in making this work. By "this" I mean attempting to take advantage of volume replication in a disaster recovery strategy as a proxy for high availability.
My personal opinion here: Don't do this. At least not until you have more experience with "normal" AFS. AFS doesn't provide high availability, but you can approach it by using more robust hardware. Whether such a disaster recovery scheme is feasible depends largely on the hardware resources available to you vs. the number and size of home and other volumes you intend to support this way. However, very few sites actually do this, which should tell you something...
In general, confusing these three different things -- volume replication, disaster recovery, and high availability -- combined with insufficient experience is likely to _increase_ your need for the latter two. Everything you've posted so far seems to indicate you take your system administration seriously, so I've no reason to doubt your abilities or the effort you are willing to put into making this work. However, AFS was not designed to work this way. I think your efforts would be better spent in putting up a "normal" AFS cell and building your experience before attempting to bend it this way.
However you eventually decide to go, you have my full support (for what that's worth), but I think we (the OpenAFS community) would be remiss for not at least showing the other side of this coin.
I'll go away now. Good luck, -- Todd Lewis <[email protected]> _______________________________________________ OpenAFS-info mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openafs.org/mailman/listinfo/openafs-info
