[5196] in Moira
Re: Debathena and Moira
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Tim Abbott)
Wed Sep 12 12:23:15 2007
Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2007 12:22:12 -0400 (EDT)
From: Tim Abbott <tabbott@MIT.EDU>
To: Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu>
cc: Garry Zacheiss <zacheiss@mit.edu>, moiradev@mit.edu, debathena@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <20070906055406.GB2787@thunk.org>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64L.0709101922101.4745@mega-man.mit.edu>
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On Thu, 6 Sep 2007, Theodore Tso wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 04, 2007 at 04:04:00PM -0400, Garry Zacheiss wrote:
>> I think concern about introducing
>> an AFS depdendency is a red herring. The moira locker and all the
>> volumes you need to traverse to reach it are replicated and
>> geographically distributed; an outage that prevents you from getting to
>> it has probably also made any environment that can meaningfully be
>> described as "Athena" effectively unuseable (and has a pretty good
>> chance of having taken the moira server with it).
>
> I suspect the concern of AFS dependency is that there might be some
> people with Linux laptops who don't use AFS (they have their own
> homedir on their machine, so it can function correctly even when off
> the network, for example), but want to be able to use other Athena
> services when they are on the network, including being able to
> administer mailing lists, etc.
That was indeed what I was referring to; sorry for the lack of clarity.
Most of our installations are laptops, and AFS still doesn't deal well
with machines changing their network address. We also support
configurations where AFS is not installed (though obviously things
requiring AFS won't be installed either). Being able to run Moira clients
when AFS isn't functioning (or isn't installed) is important to some of
our users.
> One thought --- have you considered adding a moira query which a moira
> client could use to request a recommended implementation version,
> which could be bumped by the server when a change was made that
> required a newer version of the client to fix some bug? It would be a
> small amount of development work, but it would allow the server to be
> able to let the user know that they needed a newer version of the
> client, at which point the debathena user could use "apt-get update"
> to update their client.
This option seems attractive. It means that Moira maintains the freedom
to upgrade the protocol as necessary, without making people need AFS to
run Moira clients and without obligating Garry to build Moira on the 9
different distribution/architecture pairs that we support.
-Tim Abbott
