--On Tuesday, December 16, 2003 12:39 PM -0500 Rodney M Dyer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Do any of you (how many of you) also use AFS space for running > applications from? Big apps? Many apps? On Solaris - just about everything comes out of AFS. Linux, unless it came in the RedHat distribution, it's in AFS. I'm not sure with MacOS, because we don't have any College supported MacOS labs (the University does though - I think there it's mostly local to the machine, with updates/fixes sourced out of AFS). With Windows, not as many anymore - but that's mostly because of other technology/political choices made on campus and because of Windows itself. We still have a few though - mostly applications that are on all three lab platforms in the College of Engineering, that have little or no local files requirement, and that we are responsible for deploying ourselves (rather than another campus group) This includes the JDK, StarOffice, Cadra, and CPLEX/AMPL. We've had some odd problems here and there with the applications performance-wise, some of this has been difficult to troubleshoot, but usually ended up being some kind of messed up RO replica (in one case) or a mismatched duplex on the client or somebody's servers (or in a case with one big lab, a duplex mismatch between the building entry switch and the lab switches) - rather than some issue with AFS itself. We do little or no tuning, mostly because it's a little over our heads and we don't have time or even smart part-timers to throw at doing some testing for us. We'd probably do more applications from AFS but the majority of our Windows application set is built on top of the Novell tools that are used by the central Academic IT group. These Novell tools tend to interact better with NetWare servers and the windows side of the central Academic IT group is oriented more in the direction of using Netware than AFS. Additionally, Windows applications being the total poorly designed, pain in the ass that they are, especially the Engineering ones, tend to require or work a whole lot better with a significant, locally-installed footprint. We use the aforementioned Novell tools supplied/used by the central Academic IT group to manage those local files and settings - and the installer source for these files comes off NetWare servers (because, again, the application management tools tend to understand NetWare a little better than even a persistent drive mapping to AFS). The Central Academic IT group has invested a pretty sizeable amount of time and money into a SAN and using NetWare Clustering to achieve the AFS replica-like model with the storage that backs the NetWare-delivered applications - with relatively similar high availability now. So with all that said AFS from Windows, here at NCSU, is mostly about data storage and data sharing, more than app delivery. Jason ---------------------------------------------------- Jason Young # ITECS Systems Group Manager NC State University College of Engineering _______________________________________________ OpenAFS-info mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.openafs.org/mailman/listinfo/openafs-info
