[gentoo-dev] Using OpenAFS volumes as storage for various portage directories

[Kevin <lists@gnosysllc.com>]

Hi Gentoo Devs-

Thank you to Martin MOKREJŠ and the others who contributed to the recent 
thread on new openafs ebuilds.  I've been using my own ebuilds (they're ugly 
and I doubt that anyone in the Gentoo dev-team would be interested in them, 
but if someone's interested I'd be glad to share) with OpenAFS for about a 
year now and have been using OAFS with linux for maybe two years.  OAFS has a 
great deal to offer and I'm glad to see somebody working on improving the 
support in Gentoo for OAFS.

But I'm writing today to get some pointers on the subject of keeping various 
portage directories 
(/usr/portage, /usr/portage/packages, /usr/portage/distfiles, etc.) on afs 
volumes.

I've been experimenting with this notion for a month or so and seem to be 
having no notable problems to speak of thus far, but I wonder if someone more 
expert in Gentoo than me and also familiar with OAFS could offer any 
comments.

In my experiments, I have an afs volume called portage in the afs tree and I 
make a symlink in all the networked machines' local filesystems 
at /usr/portage that points to this volume.  I have another afs volume called 
distfiles and there is a 'distfiles' symlink in the portage volume that 
points to it.  I have also set PKGDIR to /usr/packages and 
symlinked /usr/packages to another afs volume.  OAFS docs describe what seems 
to me to be a reasonably good system for storing system binaries on afs 
volumes with a general tree structure like this:

/afs
/afs/cell.name
/afs/cell.name/i386_linux24/usr/afsws/{bin,lib}
/afs/cell.name/i386_linux26/usr/afsws/{bin,lib}
/afs/cell.name/ppc_linux26/usr/afsws/{bin,lib}

and so on, and then making symlinks in the local fs to these volumes.  I'm 
just trying to extend this notion to Gentoo.

I made afs volumes under each of these architecture/linux-kernel trees called 
arch.kernel.packages.  Then, going to each machine in the network, made 
symlinks from /usr/packages to the appropriate afs volume.

This system seems to work for me pretty well, but I wonder if there are subtle 
issues that I'm overlooking that should be addressed.  One issue that I have 
thought a little about is keeping readonly access to the afs volumes that all 
the machines need and obtaining write access to the appropriate afs volumes 
whenever running an emerge --sync or emerging a package or making a quickpkg 
out of an installed package.  I have a scheme in place that works, but I'm 
sure there are many things I've overlooked with it.

Does anyone have any thoughts to share on:

a) general advisability of this (seems like a good thing to me---lots of 
savings on space across machines, oafs has a good authentication system in 
kerberos, seems better to me than running a local rsync server alone and also 
better in at least some ways than NFS, etc),
b) what special considerations I should keep in mind with such a scheme,
c) security,
d) general reading material to help me think about a-c better.

TIA.

-- 
Kevin
http://www.gnosys.us

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