Re: Openafs woes

[David Z Maze <dmaze@debian.org>]

Andrew Perrin <clists@perrin.socsci.unc.edu> writes:
> I'm running debian woody on a home machine that's behind an NAT
> masquerader (also woody). The home machine runs the OpenAFS client
> to connect to the UNC campus's AFS shared directory space. Generally
> this works fine, but there's one situation that consistently causes
> a problem.

What I've been told around here is that AFS over a NAT will maybe
probably work, if you don't have too much load and don't let it sit
idle too long, and that you can vaguely expect to lose randomly.

> The scenario is this:
> 1.) Cable modem service dies while a file in the AFS space is open
> (usually a perl or latex file in emacs).
> 2.) Cable modem service returns, and IP connectivity is fine (including to
> the AFS server).. BUT
> 3.) attempting to access files and directories in the AFS space results in
> "no such file or directory."

At this point, you might try running 'fs checks' to see if your local
AFS client believes the world exists.  Variations on 'fs flush .'
might help too.

> 4.) tokens reports appropriate kerberos tokens for the user
> 5.) klog lets me create new tokens seamlessly, but none of this allows for
> actually accessing the AFS space.

Being nitpicky, Kerberos tickets, AFS tokens.  :-)  If your site
doesn't use kaserver (UNC it appears does) but you do use krb5, you
need to remember to get addressless tickets with 'kinit -A' before
getting tokens using aklog.  But this doesn't actually apply to you.

> 6.) I can umount /afs (as root) but can't remount it. If I try
> /etc/init.d/openafs-client start, I get "I/O error."  If I try restart,
> the system hangs completely, requiring a cold reboot (power cycle).

Stopping and restarting the AFS subsystem has never worked well for
me.  I'd never try to just unmount /afs, always run
/etc/init.d/openafs-client stop, but there's no guarantee that it'll
happily restart without a reboot.  :-(

-- 
David Maze         dmaze@debian.org      http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting.  Politicking should be illegal."
	-- Abra Mitchell