[410] in Info-AFS_Redistribution
Re: AFS and NeXTs
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Wallace Colyer)
Thu Nov 14 10:41:43 1991
Date: Thu, 14 Nov 1991 09:53:01 -0500 (EST)
From: Wallace Colyer <wally+@andrew.cmu.edu>
To: Info-AFS@transarc.com, Cal_Thixton@next.com, Craig_Everhart@transarc.com
Cc: Info-AFS@transarc.com, mts@terminator.cc.umich.edu
In-Reply-To: <9111140307.AA28639@dorothy.NeXT.COM>
What you are asking us to do is to change the semantics of the
filesystem used on this campus by thousands of people to accommodate one
machine type which does not want to accept that is can be both expensive
and unfriendly to do a stat operation on anything it sees. I really
don't want every next machine in every cell to stat my cell and have to
keep pinging the connection to see if it alive.
I we go off and fake directories for this machine type we would have to
support those path names on the other system types because users would
invariably start using the new names. Since our users spend a great
deal of time collaborating with other AFS sites those path names may
have to be exported to other sites.
Craig just got in my last point, which is that you seem to be handling
the case of the automounter in a much more hacked manner than I am
suggesting. If you are willing to handle that case you could do as
Craig suggests and make everything in /afs look like a directory without
stat'ing it.
My suggestion would be to add a configuration option, StatsAreExpensive,
which would have it not stat entries in the portions of the browser
window that do not represent the highest directory being viewed. That
would be a generic solution that handles any filesystem where
indiscriminate stats are expensive as in AFS.
The other suggestion of changing the behavior of stat to lie, how can we
do this? We do not know if you are the browser or not. Many people may
use stat to see if that directory is accessible requiring the real
information to be returned.
-Wallace
