[1400] in SIPB-AFS-requests
Reorganizing AFS machine configuration directories
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (ghudson@MIT.EDU)
Sat Jun 4 16:47:17 1994
From: ghudson@MIT.EDU
Date: Sat, 4 Jun 94 16:50 EDT
To: star-maintainers@MIT.EDU
Cc: webmaster@MIT.EDU
I created this list to make it easy for people to send mail that will
be archived in all of the server-maintainer discuss meetings. Also,
because this list is now a group, we may want to use it as the ACL for
Moira updates on our server subnet. This list currently includes
sipb-afsreq, charon-maintainers, rtfm-maintainers,
anxiety-maintainers, and usenet. This list does not currently include
webmaster, but it will tomorrow.
At any rate, I'm writing here because, as Bert and other have pointed
out, the way we mirror machine configurations in AFS is a complete
mess:
* News server configuration files are tarred up by a nightly
backup script and kept in project.news, except for a small amount of
obscure cruft in project.beacon-src.
* foo-server machine configuration files are kept in
project.foo-server together with service-specific sources and scripts
(e.g. sources and scripts for the RTFM services). anxiety-closet
configuration is also there, even though it's not a foo-server. Some
references are made to project.foo-server by scripts.
The first step to cleaning this up is to move service-specific files
out of project.foo-server. I'm in the process of doing this for the
RTFM services with project.rtfm, which will get rid of most of the
cruft.
The second step is to modify our system for foo-server configurations.
The name "foo-server" is restrictive, in that the name only applies to
a few of our server machines.
I suggest that we rename project.foo-server to project.servers
(/afs/sipb/project/servers), and start mirroring news server
configuration in project.servers.
I also suggest that we stop storing sources in project.servers,
e.g. the http-bogon script in foo-server/common should probably be in
project.www.
Some issues:
- How much of the news server configurations do we want to
mirror? The files which are backed up nightly are probably good
candidates.
- Do we really have to keep editing files in AFS and copying
them locally? This is a pain, and people tend not to do it. Perhaps
we should write a nightly script that looks through all the files in
project.servers/machine-name and checks in new versions of them if
they've been modified locally.
- project.foo-server has a subdirectory "common", which was
created for files common between picayune and charon. I don't know if
they're also common to anxiety-closet, and they probably aren't common
to beacon and bed. One possible solution is to define "common" as
"common to at least two machines" and use symbolic links from the
server-specific configuration directories. A nightly update script
will presumably break any such symbolic links, but that's probably the
correct behavior.
- Are there any references to /afs/sipb/project/foo-server?
Possibly; there is certainly a reference to
/afs/sipb/project/dec-charon from picayune's nightly-jobs.conf, which
I plan to change to refer to /afs/sipb.mit.edu/project/rtfm.
- Are there cases where sources should be stored in
project.servers for lack of a better place for them? I think the
answer is almost always going to be "make a better place for them".
Objections? Comments?
--GBH
