Todd, Thanks a lot for clarifying, I am probably starting to understand what OpenAFS can actually do. Well not sure if it is the solution to my problem then... Any chances for the 'automatic replication' or something in the coming future?
Mike -----Original Message----- From: Todd Lewis [mailto:uto...@email.unc.edu] Sent: Friday, April 30, 2010 4:33 PM To: Mike Pliskin Cc: openafs-info@openafs.org Subject: Re: [OpenAFS] Getting started with OpenAFS On 04/30/2010 07:07 AM, Mike Pliskin wrote: > - speed is important as well as a way to access any file from anywhere > (but ok to degrade speed if replicas aren't synced yet) Your "replicas aren't synced yet" phrase indicates you're still under the assumption that so many people start with -- that the ro replicas are somehow automatically synced in near real time from the single rw volume. They are not. It's a manual process, or scripted, which pushes the volume image from the rw server to the ro replicas. Think of it more as a publishing operation. Everybody else is reading "today's edition" of some ro volume, while a few people are preparing the next edition. It could involve lots of changes across the volume that don't make sense separately, but only as a complete set of changes. Once you've got the contents of the rw volume consistent and the changes are complete, then you "release" that volume. The ro replicas get the changes in one go. If your users are geographically distributed, then the hope is that the ro volume they are using is on a server that is relatively close to them so the data has only to cross slow/long network links once -- during the release operation -- rather than as they read data. Writes/updates still have to get to the single rw volume across whatever network hops it takes. Note also that the path to a rw volume will differ from the path to its ro replicas (unless you've configure the client to use only rw volumes throughout your cell). Todd
