On 17 May 2011, at 10:54, Mike Legg <[email protected]> wrote: > We are looking to evaluate OpenAFS and were wondering where the best place to > get initial version / platform information. We would like to test OpenAFS on > CentOS or Debian but are not sure which versions of the application to > install and which OS is preferable. >
Hi Mike, Firstly, thanks for the interest in OpenAFS. Please feel free to ask here if your evaluation throws up any issues or questions. There also tend to be folk on the #openafs IRC channel on freenode who can help with more immediate problems. With regards to operating system, there are people running production OpenAFS cells on both Debian and CentOS. With Debian, packages are distributed as part of the operating system, CentOS packages are available from openafs.org. I'd base your decision on what local experience is available for each system, rather than on OpenAFS's requirements. The version question is a tricky one. You should definitely avoid the 1.5 series - this was a development series which has now been superseded by the 1.6 prereleases. Recommending one of 1.4 and 1.6 is harder. 1.4 is our "stable" series which is in widespread production use. 1.6 is designed to replace this, but at present 1.6 is in the final stages of prerelease testing - so we're still shaking out the bugs. There is a known data corruption bug in the latest 1.6 prerelease, for example. However, 1.6 is significantly faster than 1.4, and is what, I hope, we would be recommending to new installations in 6 months time. If your are evaluating our stability, then 1.4 is probably your best bet at present. If you are evaluating performance, or features, then the 1.6 prereleases (probably starting with pre6 when it appears) are the best place to look, Cheers, Simon.
