Some suggestions come to mind:
1) Place symlinks in the slave cells which point to the master files in
the master cell.
This means that users would still have to authenticate with slave
and master cells.
Also, trans-world file transfer would potentially take place every
time a file was
accessed from a slave cell. If ACLs contained the cell in addition to the user,
then users need not login to the master cell.
2) Have ONE BIG CELL, with file servers at all geographically dispersed
locations. In AFS 3.2,
cache managers can be induced to look at nearby servers in
preference to far-away ones.
Volumes would be replicated on all file servers. There is, however,
a limit of 7 replicas
per volume, so if you've got too many sites, your stuffed.
3) Have many cells, and use PACKAGE to update extinct copies from time
to time. You would
have to run package in a shell which authenticated appropriately
(see (1)), but at least
users would only have to authenticate with one cell. There would be
windows when local
and master files are inconsistent.
Mike Gahan, University College London
