TL;DR: AFSDB records for grand.central.org and openafs.org will go away at the end of March.
Over the next several months, we'll be making a number of changes and improvements to the infrastructure behind grand.central.org and openafs.org. Much of this work will be mostly or completely transparent, but from time to time, we'll be announcing changes visible to the community in some way. This message discusses one such change. The use of DNS SRV records to identify and locate AFS database servers was originally defined in RFC5864, published in April, 2010. This has been supported in OpenAFS since version 1.6.0, released in 2011. So, we feel fairly confident that the majority of clients include this functionality. The use of AFSDB records for this purpose, originally defined in RFC1183, has now been deprecated for many years. As with many older, obsolete, and uncommon RRTYPEs, a number of DNS implementations no longer support publishing AFSDB RRs. In order to support eventual migration of DNS for central.org and openafs.org off of CMU infrastructure, we intend to remove the AFSDB records for the grand.central.org cell and for openafs.org (which is really the same cell). This change will be made on or around the end of March, 2019. Existing SRV records will remain, and no changes are currently planned to the names or IP addresses of the database servers for this cell. -- Jeff
