[OpenAFS] [Elders] OpenAFS Project List

[Russ Allbery]

Phil Moore <Phil.Moore@msdw.com> writes:

> |------------------+--------------+---------------+----------------------|
> | Volume Management| In Progress ?| N/A           | Phil Moore (Morgan   |
> | System ? uses    | Available    |               | Stanley)             |
> | relational       |              |               |                      |
> | database at the  |              |               |                      |
> | back end         |              |               |                      |
> |------------------+--------------+---------------+----------------------|

> Did anyone on this list ever see my presentation at Decorum '97?  VMS is
> the single most important thing I ever did for AFS at MSDW, and its the
> backbone of our entire UNIX development environment (and but for
> politics and stupidity, could have been so for NT, but...)

> VMS is discussed, at a high level, in:

> http://www.mindspring.com/~wpm/decorum97/

Yup, having a relational database with information about what's where has
been a huge win for us, even though right now we use it almost exclusively
for reporting purposes and not to actually drive any management tools.
I'm looking at extending what we're doing further to support things like
usage statistics on our software volumes.

> |------------------+--------------+---------------+----------------------|
> | Back-up --       |              | Medium/High   | Morgan Stanley (Phil |
> | documentation on |              |               | Moore, Warren Yenson)|
> | interfaces       |              |               | will contribute      |
> | available in     |              |               | documentation on     |
> | terms of hooks   |              |               | Networker and vosASM.|
> | into vendor      |              |               | IBM (Laura Stentz)   |
> | backup products  |              |               | will check on the    |
> |                  |              |               | availability of      |
> |                  |              |               | documentation for the|
> |                  |              |               | ADSM/Tivoli Storage  |
> |                  |              |               | Manager interface).  |
> |------------------+--------------+---------------+----------------------|

> We use networker with vosasm, last time I looked, which was 3 years ago.
> I don't think that's changed, but all we'll be doing is making sure the
> networker/vosasm backup option is sufficiently documented.

Is this the Boxhill vosasm?  I thought that stuff wasn't available any
longer?  (We used it for years and years, but then eventually switched to
ADSM so that we could get per-file backups and better scaling; vosasm did
okay, but Networker itself just wouldn't scale to the size of our cell.)

> |------------------+--------------+---------------+----------------------|
> | Increase Limits  | ???          | ???           | Note:  Groups in     |
> | in General (e.g.,|              |               | Groups would help    |
> | > 20 entries per |              |               | with the ACL limit.  |
> | ACL, 32 character|              |               | Phil Moore (Morgan   |
> | limit on volume  |              |               | Stanley) manages the |
> | name, etc.)      |              |               | volume names in a    |
> |                  |              |               | relational database  |
> |                  |              |               | and could contribute |
> |                  |              |               | the code.            |
> |------------------+--------------+---------------+----------------------|

> See VMS.  The relevant idea here is that volume names are far too short
> for any convention that attempts to encode pathname, architecture or
> other information in the volume name to be sufficientlt descriptive.

Yup.  We run into that problem pretty routinely.

> |------------------+--------------+---------------+----------------------|
> | PERL API work    | ???          | ???           | Phil Moore (Morgan   |
> |                  |              |               | Stanley).  Phil will |
> |                  |              |               | investigate what is  |
> |                  |              |               | presented at the     |
> |                  |              |               | Garching conference, |
> |                  |              |               | and has expertise to |
> |                  |              |               | contribute as well.  |
> |------------------+--------------+---------------+----------------------|

> The old perl4 API I wrote is very, very long in the tooth, and while its
> powerful, its also slow (fork/exec's to hell and back), and I've since
> learned the ins/outs of perl5 XS programming, and enough about OO design
> to get myself into trouble.

> I'll be participating in the development of the new XS based modules,
> and see what kind of value I can add to that effort.

There's an existing XS-based Perl 5 module written some time back by
Roland Schemers here at Stanford, and I think that's the work that other
people are picking up and improving.  (The pure version won't compile any
more and hasn't since about AFS 3.4, IIRC.  Too much stuff has changed in
the library interfaces.)

All of our internal tools right now just fork and exec the various
standard client programs.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>