Distributed File Systems

[Michel Jouvin]

It has been discussed a lot in the past on this list, why you need a local 
file system for Cyrus. With AFS, part of the pb is the performance : AFS 
caching is not appriated for the kind of use Cyrus made of a filesystem 
(almost no reuse, lots of update).

One of the other pb is the need for atomic delete/rename that is generally 
not guaranteed in distributed filesystem.

Michel

--On lundi 21 octobre 2002 12:54 -0400 Dave McMurtrie <dgm+ at pitt.edu> wrote:

> On Mon, 21 Oct 2002, Josh Huber wrote:
>
>> Indeed, does someone have an answer for this question?  Everyone seems
>> to be avoiding it :)
>>
>> Can Cyrus handle storing mailboxes to an AFS drive?
>
> IMAP developers can answer this more clearly if they choose to, but the
> first thought that comes to my mind is that I believe cyrus utilizes hard
> links in the mail store in some situations (mail copy?).  AFS doesn't
> fully support hard links, so if cyrus does require a filesystem that
> supports hard links that could be a big problem.
>
> Other issues that aren't necessarily show-stoppers, but would make it
> impractical to use AFS for your mail-store:
>
> 1. It's not going to be a blazing fast performer if you use AFS for your
> mail store.
>
> 2. You have to deal with authorizing the cyrus server to write into AFS
> filespace, which means you either need to run it authenticated or set up
> IP acls on your mail store.
>
> Dave
> --
> Dave McMurtrie, Systems Programmer
> University of Pittsburgh
> Computing Services and Systems Development,
> Development Services -- UNIX and VMS Services
> 717P Cathedral of Learning
> (412)-624-6413
>



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