[HCoop-Discuss] Planning

[Derrick Brashear]

>
> Keep in mind that I'm talking about the real world, where we have no one
> familiar with AFS willing to make any particular time commitment to
> HCoop.  That means that likely newbie mistakes in controlling AFS
> configuration and processes have to be counted as costs of using AFS.

Actually, if you guess instead of asking, I count that against
careless, which is
free and universal. And it has nothing to do with AFS. If you just
jump in without looking,
and it's shallow and your break your legs, or your neck, it's not the
fault of shallow; it's the fault
of the jumper. Don't take it as condemnation. It's not. When I don't
research a decision,
screw up, and am sad, it is a lesson, not anything else.

> We have a repeating problem where Apache gets into a state where
> processes don't have the right tokens to run dynamic content properly.
> I'm sure there's a way to fix it, but it doesn't seem like that's going
> to happen, given the realities of our admin situation.

you can't create a single keytab, install krenew and use it? that's rather sad.
i could do it in 90 seconds. and being a sysadmin is not expertise i have
exercised particularly in more than 4 years.

> This definitely
> would not be a problem with local filesystems.

i won't argue that point, though

> We have had several incidents of monotonically increasing sets of zombie
> processes (mail daemon and otherwise) that are frozen in the 'D' state
> trying to access files in AFS.  This can effectively stop all IMAP/POP
> service.  The system wasn't otherwise overloaded in any detectable way.
> I've never seen this happen with local filesystems.  This was the root
> problem behind our recent downtime of a few hours.

without details, i can't comment on that at all.

> I'm sure other things have come up that I'm not remembering now.  I
> stand by my characterization of the downsides of AFS for us, though
> maybe I should make clear that the lack of experienced dedicated staff
> is a key cause.

dedicated has nothing to do with it. i ignore dementia.org except when it
stops me from doing work, and have for longer than hcoop has existed.
somehow, it still works, 15 years after it started. there have never
been dedicated
resources, ever.