[Federated-fs] discussion on bootstrapping clients

[Paul Lemahieu]

I had a talk with a few engineers here today, to get their opinions on  
the sort of client behavior they'd like to see.

Here are a few key points I heard:
    * Rely on DNS SRV records
    * This is really automount functionality
    * Lookup by domain, most likely set via DHCP. Mount each domain  
for which a SRV record exists. For example, you'd automount both /net/ 
pasadena.emc.com and /net/emc.com, if SRV records existed.
    * Have DNS return value include both hostname and path to mount (I  
was told it's possible, I'd have to look into that to understand  
more). It was felt that simply mounting / on the given host wouldn't  
be flexible enough. For example, if you ever need to move / from  
fileserver A to a subdirectory on fileserver B, but want to continue  
showing the same world, what do you do?
    * Any more "local and friendly" names, which were referred to as  
aliases, got a less than warm welcome. For example, say EMC IT wanted  
everyone to see /net/emc or even /emc. Should there be any way to do  
that?

The biggest benefit was that simply automatically mounting anything is  
the real benefit. That gets the client to the point where it has  
something it can browse.

--Paul