automating 'vos release'

[David R Boldt]

We are planning to serve web pages in a failsafe manner using
geographically separated web servers, distributed director,
and AFS.

This is going to require that we run a "vos release" on a periodic,
automated basis.

* if the read/write version of a volume has not changed since
   the last release, will "vos release" no-op, or will it try to
   synchronize anyway.

* would it make sense to attempt to determine whether a volume
  has changed before doing a release?  --I don't have a very good
  sense for how resource expensive "vos release" is.

   if it would be a good idea to only release when necessary, is there
   a more efficient way to discover whether a read/write volume has
   changed since the last release other than comparing the mtimes
   of all directories in the volumes?

Is anyone else doing this sort of thing?

                                          -- David Boldt
                                             <dboldt@usgs.gov>