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Hi Gentoo Devs- |
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Thank you to Martin MOKREJŠ and the others who contributed to the recent |
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thread on new openafs ebuilds. I've been using my own ebuilds (they're ugly |
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and I doubt that anyone in the Gentoo dev-team would be interested in them, |
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but if someone's interested I'd be glad to share) with OpenAFS for about a |
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year now and have been using OAFS with linux for maybe two years. OAFS has a |
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great deal to offer and I'm glad to see somebody working on improving the |
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support in Gentoo for OAFS. |
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But I'm writing today to get some pointers on the subject of keeping various |
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portage directories |
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(/usr/portage, /usr/portage/packages, /usr/portage/distfiles, etc.) on afs |
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volumes. |
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I've been experimenting with this notion for a month or so and seem to be |
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having no notable problems to speak of thus far, but I wonder if someone more |
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expert in Gentoo than me and also familiar with OAFS could offer any |
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comments. |
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In my experiments, I have an afs volume called portage in the afs tree and I |
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make a symlink in all the networked machines' local filesystems |
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at /usr/portage that points to this volume. I have another afs volume called |
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distfiles and there is a 'distfiles' symlink in the portage volume that |
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points to it. I have also set PKGDIR to /usr/packages and |
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symlinked /usr/packages to another afs volume. OAFS docs describe what seems |
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to me to be a reasonably good system for storing system binaries on afs |
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volumes with a general tree structure like this: |
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/afs |
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/afs/cell.name |
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/afs/cell.name/i386_linux24/usr/afsws/{bin,lib} |
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/afs/cell.name/i386_linux26/usr/afsws/{bin,lib} |
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/afs/cell.name/ppc_linux26/usr/afsws/{bin,lib} |
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and so on, and then making symlinks in the local fs to these volumes. I'm |
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just trying to extend this notion to Gentoo. |
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I made afs volumes under each of these architecture/linux-kernel trees called |
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arch.kernel.packages. Then, going to each machine in the network, made |
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symlinks from /usr/packages to the appropriate afs volume. |
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This system seems to work for me pretty well, but I wonder if there are subtle |
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issues that I'm overlooking that should be addressed. One issue that I have |
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thought a little about is keeping readonly access to the afs volumes that all |
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the machines need and obtaining write access to the appropriate afs volumes |
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whenever running an emerge --sync or emerging a package or making a quickpkg |
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out of an installed package. I have a scheme in place that works, but I'm |
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sure there are many things I've overlooked with it. |
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Does anyone have any thoughts to share on: |
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a) general advisability of this (seems like a good thing to me---lots of |
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savings on space across machines, oafs has a good authentication system in |
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kerberos, seems better to me than running a local rsync server alone and also |
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better in at least some ways than NFS, etc), |
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b) what special considerations I should keep in mind with such a scheme, |
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c) security, |
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d) general reading material to help me think about a-c better. |
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TIA. |
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|
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-- |
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Kevin |
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http://www.gnosys.us |
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-- |
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gentoo-dev@g.o mailing list |
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