[HCoop-Discuss] Reorganizing, people-wise and tech-wise

[Adam Chlipala]

François-Denis Gonthier wrote:
> I agree AFS is very useful, that it can scale beyond.  I don't doubt
> it's quality.  The problem is that there isn't enough knowledgeable AFS
> administrator in the coop that are willing to give time to keep the
> install at a decent quality level.
>
> The recent outage show it's not working quite good enough yet.  I would
> not be annoyed by the recent problems with AFS if someone could tell me
> what they were and how we plan to avoid them in the future.  That
> doesn't to be the case.
>
> I don't see any way out of this that would help us keep AFS.  If such a
> way exists then I'm all for sticking with it.
>   

I think there's a pretty good chance that just reducing load on machines 
would solve the problems we've had. The bigger problem is making sure we 
have multiple admins who are competent to set the whole thing up from 
scratch and then maintain it, with specific response-time commitments. 
So far we have no one with those properties for AFS among current admins 
or the people volunteering.

I think the bottom line is that we shouldn't use any service that we 
can't have at least four time-committed admins prepared to install and 
maintain. There's a standard set of Linux services for which it's 
embarrassingly easy to meet that requirement, and they handle the needs 
of almost all of our members.