Welcome to the sixth issue of the OpenAFS newsletter. This newsletter summarizes what is happening in the OpenAFS community.
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. Any news about AFS-related projects is welcome and may be submitted to Jason for inclusion in the next newsletter.
The current and past issues of this newsletter are available at http://www.openafs.org/newsletter/
There were three OpenAFS 1.5.x releases since the last newsletter. OpenAFS 1.5.65 was released on October 6, 2009. Highlights of this release include several important bugfixes. All of the existing compile-time warnings have been silenced, but they may be re-enabled with a ./configure option. This was done to help prevent new warnings from creeping into the code. The configure option can be used for those developers trying to clean up the older warnings.
There was some discussion of allowing one or two hyphens to specify command-line options. Michael Meffie supplied a patch to allow this and it was approved. This feature will be included in a future release.
The OpenAFS web site is now using git for source control, and the older CVS repository for the web site has been disabled.
Jeff Altman and Derrick Brashear gave a status update on OpenAFS progress at the European AFS Meeting. Your File System Inc. has committed to working on several improvements to OpenAFS and contributing them back to OpenAFS. There is more information in the Jeff & Derrick's slides at http://www.dia.uniroma3.it/~afscon09/docs/part1.pdf and http://www.dia.uniroma3.it/~afscon09/docs/part3.pdf. There is an updated roadmap at http://www.openafs.org/roadmap.html.
There is some discussion about getting rid of the AFS lock icon in the Windows system tray for future versions of AFS. A few people value the clear indication that the lock icon gives for being logged in. Please join in the discussion on the openafs-info mailing list.
On September 22-24, an AFS Hackathon was held at The School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Simon Wilkinson posted a summary on the openafs-devel and afs3-standardization mailing lists. The summary is available at https://lists.openafs.org/pipermail/openafs-devel/2009-October/017096.html
The jabber chat logs of the Hackathon are available at http://conference.openafs.org/hackathon@conference.openafs.org/
The Second Annual European AFS Workshop was held at Roma Tre University, Italy, on September 28-30, 2009.
Ref: http://www.dia.uniroma3.it/~afscon09/
The attendance of the event remained stable at about 50 people from 6 countries, including two colleagues from Pilsen, Czech Republic. There was an introductory day, a day dealing with advanced topics, and a final half-day dedicated mainly to site reports. Social activities consisted of a sponsored bus tour through Rome (Sun Microsystems), a sponsored visit to St Paul's Basilica (DIA Roma Tre), the second largest cathedral after St. Peter's, and two dinners in typical Roman restaurants, where the attendants proudly consumed more wine than water.
Thanks to INFN, this year Jeffrey Altman and Derrick Brashear were again the invited guests, and Hartmut Reuter provided a detailed tutorial on the combination of AFS with object storage. The slides of all talks are available on the website, and the event was transmitted in real-time streaming, provided by ENEA. Recordings can be freely accessed over the web.
This workshop was a joint effort of the Department of Informatics and Automation from Roma Tre University, and three research institutions: CASPUR, ENEA, INFN. Two industrial sponsors contributed: E4 company and Sun Microsystems.
The next year's conference will be hosted either in Pilsen, Czech Republic, or Hamburg, Germany.
--Wolfgang Alexander Gehrke
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.
There is some progress in afs3-standardization. There are new protocol descriptions for rxgk, rxk5, and Rx/OSD that were published in advance of the hackathon, I just submitted a proposal for SRV records for AFS, and I think there was an extended callback draft published as well.
--Russ Allbery
Current active protocol drafts:
AFS Callback Extensions
http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-benjamin-extendedcallbackinfo-00.txt
DNS SRV Resource Records for AFS
Project Contacts:
Andrew Deason <adeason@sinenomine.net>
Tom Keiser <tkeiser@sinenomine.net>
Mike Meffie <mmeffie@sinenomine.net>
A fix for 124484 (volumes not salvaged on first access from volserver) is nearing completion, and should see public review soon. 124484 may be the last critical DAFS bug; we are currently trying to reproduce earlier-seen problems with the newest patches to see if they still exist.
We are also working on improved developer documentation for DAFS, as it has been noted that a lack of a broad overview for the changes DAFS brings (specifically in the volume package) has made contributions and review prohibitively difficult for newcomers to DAFS code.
--Andrew
Project Contact:
Claudio Bisegni <Claudio.Bisegni@lnf.infn.it>
The MacOSX Preference Pane has been updated to use the launchd start mode. StartupItems has been replaced by the launchd technology. The behavior of the OpenAFS service at startup can be managed from the Preference Pane. Both the launchd daemon and the preference pane use the /Library/OpenAFS/Tools/root.client/usr/vice/etc/afs.rc file to start or stop OpenAFS.
Project Contacts:
Matt Benjamin <matt@linuxbox.com>
XCB was discussed at Edinburgh, and at the request of the group, a new I-D draft was published, removing mention of asynchronous delivery. That feature will be revisited in future. The XCB draft is under last call, and interested parties are requested to review the draft and send comments or indication of "support" or "not support" to the afs3-standardization list.
A draft document of the protocol changes is available at http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-benjamin-extendedcallbackinfo-00.txt.
Project Contacts:
Matt Benjamin <matt@linuxbox.com>
I am gradually sending changes indirectly related to NetBSD cache manager port. The most recent are related to AFS_PROC and AFS_UCRED.
Project Contacts:
Matt Benjamin <matt@linuxbox.com>
Marcus Watts <mwd@umich.edu>
Marcus have a presentation at the European AFS Meeting http://www.dia.uniroma3.it/~afscon09/docs/watts.pdf
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.
The Google Summer of code is over for this year. The code from the three active GSoC projects is available at http://code.google.com/p/google-summer-of-code-2009-openafs/downloads/list
Student Developer: Jake Thebault-Spieker <summatusmentis@gmail.com>
Mentor: Derrick Brashear <shadow@gmail.com>
Self-intro: https://lists.openafs.org/pipermail/openafs-devel/2009-April/016590.html
The server preferences project has implemented code for the Windows platform to rank servers based on packet round-trip time which is currently available in gerrit. Using throughput as well will have updated code in gerrit soon (although this is still a work in progress).
Upon getting code that seems reasonable for the Windows platform, the Unix port should be a matter of re-implementing the code, but not changing too much. I hope to have the unix port completed within a month, time-allowing.
--Jake
Even though the Google Summer of code has ended, Jake will continue working on the project until completion. He is still working within the original specifications of the project.
A presentation about Jake's work was given at the European AFS Workshop http://www.dia.uniroma3.it/~afscon09/docs/part2.pdf.
--Ed.
Disconnected AFS support
Pthreaded Ubik
Rx OSD integration & Raw Vicep Access in Clients
Userspace cache manager
Better Documentation
Here is a list of tickets that have been resolved since September 1, 2009:
ticket # state created title
1187: resolved Oct 31, 2002 rxgen features
124990: resolved Jun 25, 2009 addition of doc/arch/dafs-vnode-fsa.dot
125099: resolved Jul 14, 2009 1.4.11 ../configure; make fails
125101: resolved Jul 15, 2009 ubik_VL_GetEntryByIDN not attempted
125151: resolved Jul 23, 2009 make clean issue on OSX
125158: resolved Jul 24, 2009 Re: getcwd() returns invalid working directory in chroot environment
125226: resolved Aug 14, 2009 ktc_curpag deactivated for non Kerberos environment -> breaks pam_afs.so
125285: resolved Aug 26, 2009 afs global lock not held
125342: resolved Sep 01, 2009 Mac OS 1.4 and 1.5 clients fail with huge root [=cache] partition sizes
125351: resolved Sep 02, 2009 Bug Report: windows client flooding fileserver
125355: resolved Sep 03, 2009 missing init causes erratic results using the client's "hard mount" functionality
125388: resolved Sep 09, 2009 OpenAFS 1.5.50 on Windows clients can DoS an openafs cell
125389: resolved Sep 10, 2009 Integrated login failed: Unknown code KTC2 on windows 1.5.6204
125391: resolved Sep 11, 2009 windows 64-bit 1.5.63 msi installer is corrupt