[Infrastructures] AFS in an infrastructure

[Patrick M McNeal]

> I'd be very interested in a more detailed description, such as your
> top-level AFS directory structure, what role AFS plays, what role  
> radmind
> plays, etc..

I don't run our AFS installation, so I can't give you too much  
information on it beyond that we have been using it for years and it's  
a crucial part of our infrastructure.

We currently use radmind to bootstrap, maintain, update and tripwire  
our entire linux and Mac OS X deployment.  On any one given platform,  
we have a common base that all systems use, and layer on personality  
overload to produce the desired system.  Radmind it self stores files  
in a platform agnostic format so that actual data store can be  
anywhere.

Since radmind is used to build the entire system, we are very  
protective of the data.  In the worst case scenario, we would restore  
the radmind loadsets from backup and go from there.  Rsync can be used  
to sync this data across multiple radmind servers so even this problem  
can be mitigated.

With these machines being so crucial, our goal was to minimize  
dependancies.  One way we did this was not to use AFS or any other  
networked filesystem as for storage.

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Patrick M McNeal				GnuPG Public Key:
mcneal@umich.edu				http://umich.edu/~mcneal/mcneal.pgp