[Federated-fs] FedFS Minutes, 8/21/2008

[James Lentini]

FedFS Minutes, 8/21/2008
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Attendees
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Renu Tewari (IBM/ARC)
James Lentini (NetApp)
Paul Lemahieu (EMC)
Manoj Naik (IBM/ARC)

Minutes
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+ Precisely specifying LDAP types

  During the meeting last week, Dan lamented that the drafts do not 
  define the LDAP NSDB types more precisely. Stronger types would 
  keep many invalid values out of the LDAP database (e.g. a field 
  containing an IP address would at least be syntactically valid).

  James Lentini is researching if this is possible.

  Paul will ask Mario if he has any pointers on this subject.

  Do we need do the error checking on the LDAP?

  We observed that there will still be error checking necessary 
  by the server/admin utility.

  Renu noted that RFC 2307: An Approach for Using LDAP as a Network
  Information Service could be a good example of how to define the 
  types more precisely.

+ Push vs Pull for master root fileset replicas

  We decided in previous meetings that the file servers will 
  pull the master root fileset.

  The open issue is how to efficiently determine what has changed
  (what are the deltas?).

+ How do other protocols, such as CIFS and DFS, make use of FedFS?

  We came up with several questions:

  Should the NSDB return different answers for an NFS exported fs 
  versus and CIFS exported fs?

  Can Active Directory be used as an NSDB? And if so, how?

  For a Windows environment, we should be careful about requiring
  Active Directory usage. Typically, the Active Directory administrators 
  and the storage administrators are different people.

  Along the same lines, we don't want to require Active Directory.

  We will research the mechanism CIFS uses to implement referrals and what 
  information MS DFS stores in active directory (the MS DFS documentation 
  has information on this).

+ Agenda items for next week:
  - LDAP transactions
  - Feedback on Dan's changes to NSDB Protocol document