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OpenAFS Newsletter, Issue 5, September 2009

Welcome to the fifth 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/

General OpenAFS Progress

OpenAFS 1.5.62 was released on August 28, 2009. Highlights of this release include several critical bugfixes and support for Mac OS X Snow Leopard. 1.4.11 is still the recommended release for all Unix platforms, including Snow Leopard. Testing of the 1.5.62 version on Unix platforms is encouraged.

Russ Allbery gave an update on the progress of a non-profit organization for OpenAFS. The Elders have decided that there are multiple issues, including on-going funding, that make the formation of a non-profit problematic at this time. In the interim, the Elders have voted unanimously to approach the Software Freedom Conservancy and request membership. The Elders will move forward with forming a foundation once the economy picks up. For more information and some important details, read Russ' announcement at: http://lists.openafs.org/pipermail/openafs-announce/2009/000303.html

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

European AFS Meeting

The University Roma Tre will host the 2009 European AFS Meeting from September 28-30. The European workshop is mainly a platform for system administrators to exchange their knowledge and report use cases. Topics of interest include related technologies like Kerberos or LDAP and all supported operating systems.

For more details, go to http://www.dia.uniroma3.it/~afscon09/

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

*BSD Support

Project Contacts:

I've been working on NetBSD client targeting master. I've sent a number of changes, most committed, preparing for this. My plan is to have something committed by the EU AFS Conference in Rome.

Extended Callback Information

Project Contacts:

The dependencies have begun to merge on the master branch (MCAS and all changes are merged, miniosi is in review, XCB changesets will follow).

Kerberos v5 and Multiple Encryption Types

Project Contacts:

Marcus is preparing a draft paper describing the protocol and implementation details. (I've read a draft.) It is planned to be published in the next week or so. We began submitting split-out Rxk5 changesets, the gatekeepers want to put these on a work-in-process git branch, more TBD.

--Matt (Ed: Received Sept 4, 2009)

Better Documentation

Project Contacts:

Jason updated sections 3.2 through 3.4 of chapter 2 in the Admin Guide. Information about cross-realm trusts and foreign PTS users was included. The instructions for submitting entries to the public CellServDB were updated. Some text about using Freelance and Dynamic Root modes to find foreign cells was added.

Demand-Attach FileServer (DAFS)

Project Contacts:

Only one or two DAFS issues remain that we believe are critical: 124484 (volumes not salvaged on first access from volserver), and possibly 124487 (fileserver/salvageserver lock up). 124487 may already be fixed by a recently-merged patch for 124486 (fileserver hangs on shutdown), so 124484 may be the only remaining critical issue.

All other issues beyond those are either performance issues or are relatively minor. Once they are fixed, we consider DAFS to be production-ready, lacking any other issues. We can't fix issues we don't know about, though, so testing DAFS is greatly appreciated. Even if it may not appropriate for production in arbitrary critical environments quite yet, DAFS is definitely usable in its current state if you want to try it out.

If you are interested in trying out DAFS, Steven Jenkins has written up how to get started with it here: http://blog.endpoint.com/2009/06/getting-started-with-demand-attach.html

--Andrew

Userspace cache manager

Project Contact:

I have a working userspace unix OpenAFS client implemented via FUSE, and perl bindings to libuafs (via SWIG). Neither are as fully-featured as the kernel cache manager yet, but they are sufficient for simple filesystem access, and can be used to simulate multiple clients from a single machine.

The code is not in the main repository yet, as I need to clean up some of the libuafs modifications, and make it play nice with the other users of libuafs. If you want to mess around with them, though, feel free to contact me.

Mac OS X OpenAFS Preference Pane

Project Contact:

The work done on the preference pane was directed to clean the code for deprecated API's and adjustment for Snow Leopard. NSMenuExtra is a private API that was never supported and has been changed to a Background Only Application (AFSBackgrounder) that uses NSStatusItem to show the OpenAFS lock icon on the OS X menu bar. The AFSBackgrounder is also used to get a token at login time.

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.

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

Progress is rolling with the management console. It can be built with nmake now for both 32-bit and 64-bit machines. It installs and runs. Current tasks are polishing any install issues and bringing the console up to full functionality. After talking with Jeff, there will also be some redesigning of the user interface from the prototyped user interface to have a less cluttered user interface and to better follow the MMC 3.0 Guidelines.

Google Projects without an update

The following Google Summer of Code projects did not give a status update:

Projects with no progress or no update

Resolved Tickets

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

  ticket # state     created       title
   108199: resolved  Jul 21, 2008  Incomplete file transfer : Bug Report
   125211: resolved  Aug 12, 2009  OpenAFS 1.5.61 says invalid cell during install
   125217: resolved  Aug 13, 2009  OpenAFS configure script of the source RPM doen't handle INIT_WORK_HAS_DATA macro correctly on SLES-11
   125220: resolved  Aug 13, 2009  Bug Report
   125298: resolved  Aug 28, 2009  find_task_by_vpid removed in kernel 2.6.31
   125301: resolved  Aug 28, 2009  OpenAFS 1.5.62 version discrepancy