One down, two to go

December 14, 2009

This morning the first of three Informatics AFS DB servers was successfully switched to a new machine. It’s great to finally get it off the ancient Dell GX270 we were using but more importantly this is using the new LCFG openafs component. We now have pretty much full control of that DB server using the LCFG component and we have nagios monitoring!


New openafs component

December 3, 2009

As part of the AFS project I have been working on a new openafs component which can manage the configuration of our AFS clients and servers. The development part of this work is now almost complete. The final stages remaining involve switching to new DB servers and then converting the file servers and all the clients to the new component. This should all happen in the next couple of months.

As a testing phase I am planning to convert all the Informatics ‘develop’ machines to the new component before Christmas. I’ve been using it for quite a while on some of my desktops without problems. If you want to get
ahead of the game you can put this macro at the top (before any #include) of an LCFG source profile:

#define DICE_NEW_OPENAFS_COMPONENT

Once the new profile has been processed by the LCFG client on your machine you should then reboot. If all goes well you won’t really notice any differences! Please check /var/lcfg/log/openafs and report
anything in there which you think might be odd/wrong.

For the interested there is thorough documentation of the resources in the lcfg-openafs manual pages.

I’ve also put together some documentation on how to use the new component to configure AFS servers:

I’ve also put together a plan for the first switchover of a DB server, which is planned to happen at 8am on Monday 14th December.

All comments/questions/suggestions on the new component are welcome.