[Federated-fs] discussion on bootstrapping clients

[Ellard, Daniel]

Regarding the automounter, yes, this could be done by a module in
something extensible like autofs.  That would be a fine vehicle for
getting the top-level working, but that doesn't addess all of the
issues.  The first issue is what the autofs module needs to do to get
the info it requires (not a big deal, but it needs to be speced).  The
second, and in my opinion more important, issue is about configuration.
Right now, when I set up autofs on a new unixy machine, I have to copy
several scripts and config files and create some directories and
symlinks (and these operations require root or sudo) -- and these are
neither portable nor user-friendly.  I'd like to improve on that.  We'd
really like users to be able to utter a reasonably mnemonic name for the
the filesystem they want, and have it appear in their namespace (if
accessible, etc) without any more fuss.

I think this is consistent with your last paragraph, but it never hurts
to be sure...

-Dan

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Lemahieu [mailto:LeMahieu_Paul at emc.com] 
Sent: Friday, May 16, 2008 9:22 PM
To: federated-fs at sdsc.edu
Subject: [Federated-fs] discussion on bootstrapping clients

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