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OpenAFS Newsletter, Issue 3, July 2009

Welcome to the third issue of the OpenAFS newsletter. The newsletter summarizes what is happening in the OpenAFS community. The main thing to report in this issue is the conversion of CVS to git. Git is now ready for use in development. I suspect that many people were very busy or on vacation this month, because many of the subprojects did not reply to requests for project updates.

As always, volunteers, patches, bug reports, or any other type of help is greatly appreciated.

Feedback on this newsletter is welcome. The goal is to summarize the various development efforts and news of OpenAFS for the community. Please let Jason Edgecombe <jason@rampaginggeek.com> know what you would like to see out of this newsletter.

The current and past issues of this newsletter are available at http://www.openafs.org/newsletter/

General OpenAFS Progress

Many thanks go to Simon Wilkinson for finishing the conversion from CVS to git and setting up gerrit. Gerrit has only been up for a week and there are already over 100 patches that have been merged!

1.4.11 has been released, and it includes major bugfixes for Linux clients and fileservers. Some minor bugs were fixed on other platforms. The release notes are available at http://www.openafs.org/frameset/dl/openafs/1.4.11/RELNOTES-1.4.11

Events

AFS Hackathon

The School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh will be hosting an AFS Hackathon 22-24 September (immediately before the European AFS Conference). All OpenAFS developers are welcome to attend - please see the email to openafs-announce for details, and RSVP to sxw@inf.ed.ac.uk

Annual Best Practices Workshop

Plans are already underway for the seventh Workshop, to be held May 24-28, 2010, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. We hope to see you there.

Projects

Security Releases

Security Officer:

No security issues since 1.4.9, 1.4.10, and 1.5.59 were released in April 2009.

Git

Project Contact:

During the week of 6th July, we completed our transition to the git version control system. Git, and gerrit (our code review tool) are now ready for use! See http://www.dementia.org/twiki/bin/view/AFSLore/GitDevelopers for more details.

Pthreaded Ubik

Project Contact:

The pthreaded ubik's initial code delivery to provide for use of POSIX threads instead of LWPs was made in April 2008. After some production usage, some problems were found in initialization (on certain platforms) and lack of locking, leading to data corruption in some cases for the vlserver. As part of the analysis of these problems, some differences were identified between the private version of OpenAFS being used and the version in OpenAFS HEAD, several other longstanding issues with vos, vlclient, and the vlserver were identified, and some patches have been submitted:

Current work involves cleaning up and testing a patch to fix improper handling of multi-homed IP addresses in the VLDB. The patches to fix the logging are undergoing further testing and analysis (both code review and automated testing with Helgrind), and we hope to have those submitted soon as well.

--Steven

Rx OSD integration & Raw Vicep Access in Clients

Project Contacts:

The RxOSD-integration is now documented at http://pfanne.rzg.mpg.de/trac/openAFS-OSD. This website offers technical documentation as well as links to prebuilt rpm- packages for some distributions (CentOS,Fedora, Mandriva, RHEL, openSUSE, and SLES). Anyone willing to contribute is cordially intvited to drop a line to the maintainers. Patches are currently being prepared and targeted at the 1.4.x stable branch, they are published on https://dvinfo.ifh.de/AfsOsd/Patches. Patches for 1.5.x are coming up.

Google Summer of Code 2009

OpenAFS received four slots for the 2009 Google Summer of Code.

Go to http://socghop.appspot.com/org/home/google/gsoc2009/openafs for more information about the GSoC projects.

Three of the projects are still active. Unfortunately, one student had to back out.

The following projects did not give a status update:

OpenAFS Management Console on Windows

Student Developer: Brant Gurganus <brant@gurganus.name>

Mentor: Jeffrey Altman <jaltman@secure-endpoints.com>

Self-intro: https://lists.openafs.org/pipermail/openafs-devel/2009-April/016591.html

The Google Summer of Code program is at its half way point. With that, the management console has a complete user interface as well as deployment packages. Project downloads and source will be available at http://code.google.com/p/openafsclientmmc

Projects with no progress or no update

Resolved Tickets

Since Gerrit is now the preferred method of accepting patches instead of RT, it's likely that fewer RT tickets will be filed.

Here is a list of tickets that have been resolved since June 1, 2009:

  ticket # state     created       title
     3210: resolved  Feb 03, 2004  multiprobealternateaddress doesn't remove bad interfaces for this uuid
    18596: resolved  May 06, 2005  [Patch] add module license macro to Linux kernel module
    60275: resolved  Apr 25, 2007  'make dest' fails to create man dir + manpages
   101309: resolved  Jun 02, 2008  DAFS: error creating volumes on 1.5.38 with demand attach
   124492: resolved  Mar 17, 2009  DAFS: new volumes always require salvaging
   124709: resolved  Apr 28, 2009  linux26 issue with pagsh.krb and Pag location in group list
   124763: resolved  May 11, 2009  Windows Vista 64 bit would not reboot cleanly after running 64-bit 1.5.59 installer
   124891: resolved  Jun 01, 2009  CellServDB parsing subject to buffer overflows
   124893: resolved  Jun 02, 2009  ptserver debug flag correction
   124894: resolved  Jun 02, 2009  ptprocs vicelog newlines and loglevels
   124898: resolved  Jun 03, 2009  src/aklog/klog.c uninitialized variable tofree
   124910: resolved  Jun 08, 2009  Windows: cm_cell_t lists not properly protected by cm_cellLock
   124923: resolved  Jun 12, 2009  opensolaris 'struct conn' conflict
   124924: resolved  Jun 12, 2009  Re: OpenAFS and OpenSolaris
   124933: resolved  Jun 15, 2009  Problems to access to the read only volume.
   124938: resolved  Jun 16, 2009  ubik "allbetter" log levels
   124939: resolved  Jun 16, 2009  src/config/Makefile.version missing in OpenAFS 1.4.11 RC1
   124942: resolved  Jun 16, 2009  Linux: cache files: use i_op->setattr if defined
   124946: resolved  Jun 17, 2009  call gethostbyname() from cellconfig.c afsconf_GetCellInfo()
   124952: resolved  Jun 18, 2009  2 small things to make 1.4.11pre1 build on FreeBSD 6.1
   124976: resolved  Jun 23, 2009  fix for tests-generate-dirpath-in-makefile
   124986: resolved  Jun 24, 2009  Linux: try to deal with unexported rcu_read_{un}lock
   124991: resolved  Jun 25, 2009  1.4.11pre2 on suse
   124996: resolved  Jun 26, 2009  Linux: fix rcu patch fallout for 1.5/head
   125001: resolved  Jun 26, 2009  Linux: conditionally compile search for key_type_keyring
   125015: resolved  Jun 29, 2009  What Are Pheromones? -- Let's Finnd Out
   125018: resolved  Jun 29, 2009  Windows: lost FetchData error codes in cm_GetBuffer?
   125020: resolved  Jun 29, 2009  Incorrect ubik_client reinitialization in CallPreamble
   125064: resolved  Jul 07, 2009  vos doesn't display vnode accesses unless updateDate is set
   125079: resolved  Jul 09, 2009  OpenAFS 1.5.59 crash dump
   125089: resolved  Jul 12, 2009  Symbol find_task_by_vpid no longer available to modules as of Linux 2.6.31
   125093: resolved  Jul 13, 2009  afsd_servivce.exe at 45% cpu and explorer hangs.
   125111: resolved  Jul 16, 2009  vos listvol -format shows incorrect volume name when busy