[1334] in athena10
Re: [Debathena] #124: De-crustify the CellServDB
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Tom Fitzgerald)
Fri Mar 6 18:55:08 2009
From: Tom Fitzgerald <tfitz@MIT.EDU>
To: Evan Broder <broder@mit.edu>
Cc: Jonathon Weiss <jweiss@mit.edu>, debathena@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <49B19C95.2050609@mit.edu>
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Date: Fri, 06 Mar 2009 18:49:17 -0500
Message-Id: <1236383357.5851.98.camel@sligo.mit.edu>
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> Whoa - that's not at all what I'm suggesting. All current Athena
> releases (Solaris 9.4, Linux 9.4, and Debathena) will use AFSDB records
> when a cell isn't in their CellServDB, so there are actually 0 hoops to
> jump through.
For cell admins who are in a position to get AFSDB records, yes.
The point of having a CellServDB (at least in environments with
afsdb support, like Athena) is to connect to cells that don't have
AFSDB records. About half the cells in Athena's current CellServDB
don't have them.
> That's absolutely not true. There's a cost to maintaining our own CSDB -
> it takes longer for us to receive updates when something changes,
> because they have to go through jhutz and then through ops.
Then I think the argument is for using grand.central.org's
CellServDB as-is, unmodified. (This is what I was recommending,
if that wasn't clear.)
> Instead, I think that we should not provide CSDB entries for most cells
> that (a) aren't closely related to MIT and (b) don't have valid AFSDB
> records. I'd be glad to try and construct such a CSDB based on the g.c.o
> one and pass that to jhutz, if that makes it more likely for ops to
> adopt it here.
But there's no reason to have CellServDB entries for cells that
*do* have AFSDB records - they'll be handled correctly.
The CellServDB needs to contain cells that don't have AFSDB
records, if anyone might care about them.
And I still don't think anybody here is in a position to decide
what cells are closely related to MIT. Any Athena user in any
department may feel that some random cell is closely related to
MIT because it has data he cares about. If that cell lacks
AFSDB records and isn't in Athena's CellServDB then he is going
to be stuck troubleshooting something he should not need to.
