[619] in Release_7.7_team
Filesystem Naming, something completely different
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Craig Fields)
Mon Jul 1 18:15:26 1996
Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 18:15:15 -0400
From: Craig Fields <cfields@MIT.EDU>
To: ops@MIT.EDU
Cc: ghudson@MIT.EDU, release-team@MIT.EDU
What I proposed in my last message is a little bit tricky to maintain,
and there's also a minor screw case involved. I have a new proposal
which there is really no trickiness in maintaining.
First, I proposed naming packs like
public-sun4sys-77 (7.7 packs)
public-sun4sys (8.0, or current packs)
This has the overhead of renaming old packs when we move on, which
involves renaming 3 filesystems (public-sunsys, public-sun-os,
public-sun-srvd) in addition to updating the cluster information in
moira to follow the name change. And machines that somehow may have
been messed up in moira could possibly lose if they have no hesiod
info but continue to track "public-sunsys."
Less work would be to always append the version to the name as
used in cluster information,
public-sun4sys-77 (7.7 packs)
public-sun4sys-80 (8.0 packs)
and then for human convenience, make "public-sun4sys" an alias that
points to whatever the current packs are, such as "public-sun4sys-80".
Then we never have to rename pack hierarchies or mirror the changes in
the cluster info, reducing the potential for error.
A second proposal I have is to reduce the number of filesystem names
we have to maintain. Under our current scheme we have, for example:
Cluster Filesystem Actual filesystems
alpha-sgi -> alpha-sgisys -> MUL alpha-sgi-os alpha-sgi-srvd
beta-sgi -> beta-sgisys -> MUL beta-sgi-os beta-sgi-srvd
early-sgi -> early-sgisys -> MUL early-sgi-os early-sgi-srvd
public-sgi -> public-sgisys -> MUL public-sgi-os public-sgi-srvd
Both alpha* and beta* refer to exactly the same packs in the dev cell.
Both early* and public* refer to exactly the same packs in the athena cell.
I would like to change this to:
Cluster Filesystem Actual filesystems
alpha-sgi -> dev-sgisys -> MUL dev-sgi-os dev-sgi-srvd
beta-sgi -> dev-sgisys -> MUL dev-sgi-os dev-sgi-srvd
early-sgi -> athena-sgisys -> MUL athena-sgi-os athena-sgi-srvd
public-sgi -> athena-sgisys -> MUL athena-sgi-os athena-sgi-srvd
This maintains the cluster differentiations, but reduces the number of
filesystems that need to be maintained by a factor of two. I find
maintaining filesystems in moira to be error-prone and tedious, so I
think this would be a great feature.
Combining the two proposals minimizes the amount of maintenance
required, resulting in names looking like:
Cluster Filesystem Actual filesystems
alpha-sgi -> dev-sgisys-8.0 -> MUL dev-sgi-os-8.0 dev-sgi-srvd-8.0
beta-sgi -> dev-sgisys-8.0 -> MUL dev-sgi-os-8.0 dev-sgi-srvd-8.0
Full adoption of this system would result in the actual cluster for
the Sun next week looking like:
hesinfo public-sun4 cluster
syslib athena-sun4sys-77 7.7
syslib athena-sun4sys-80 8.0
Craig
