Excerpts from mail: 6-Jan-95 AFS and 3rd party SW packages Iancu
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (2625*)
> Hi,
> The note below from Craig and other mails on info-afs have hit on
> what is currently a soft spot for us: 3rd party SW vendor support
> of AFS.
> Have you ever encoutered the situation in which:
> sysadmin: "we shall move all your data to a new filesystem tomorrow.
> its faster, more reliable, more secure, etc..."
> user/customer: "Great, but wait... does the XXXYYYZZZ SW from aaabbccc
> company support it?"
> sysadmin: "well,.. not officially, but we have tested it here and there
> seem to be no problem with it".
> user/customer: "I believe you, but what if in their next release we
> stumble on something, who will be responsible?".
> etc, etc.
> There are not very many companies out there that claim in their data
> sheets that their support AFS, yet I bet 90% of SW packages do run
> in an AFS environment with little or no problem. The questions are:
> 1. what do you do with the remaining 10% ?
> but much more important,
> 2. how do you make your user/customer environment feel 100% confident
> that they are not taking any risks? (remember, they dont care
> much about filesystems.... ;-)
> comments are welcome.
> -- Igal Iancu
In our AFS environment we have run into a few problems,
mostly annoying problems, like having to go to the license
server machine in order to read the license server's
log file, which is opened by the server and never closed, so it's
cached there and thus can only be read from there until the
license server is stopped. Annoying but it can be lived with.
Nothing like looking at the log file and seeing the last entry
dated two months ago, and, after a little panic, checking the same
file on the license server machine which shows an up-to-date log.
File locking used to be a big problem with some applications
using various UNIX file locking modes. These problems disappeared
for us as AFS matured.
It's probably best to ask the vendor for a demo copy of the software.
I've had vendors drop off a copy of their software to use for a few
days before purchasing it. So far, except for one application, we have
been able to install and successfully run all of our applications. The
one exception is no longer a problem since some file locking problems
a few years ago were fixed. The main problems we have now
deal with:
1)the cache manager not writing back until the file is closed
2)SW which require modifications to system areas
3)losing network connections to the file servers
(1) is supposed to be fixed in DFS which is supposed to be
POSIX compliant. We haven't check this out ourselves though.
(2) would be a problem in NFS environments as well and from
our experience is only found in large appplications which used to
live on mainframes and have been ported to UNIX.
(3) is probably always going to be with us like death and taxes :^}
Though problems exist, in our experience all can be worked
around. The main thing to watch out for are applications which
require kernel mods which will conflict with AFS kernel mods,
and file locking. In general, I worry about old applications or
applications ported from mainframes, or very large applications
or complex applications which require kernel mods or lots
of system additions or modifications.
-Jim
Jim Sullivan
National Institutes of Health
Bethesda, MD 20892
Internet: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
