How Efficient/Stable are the am-utils? 10
Steve Baum asks: "I'm thinking of replacing a current tangle of NFS cross-mounted
disks with the
am-utils system, which maintains a cache of mounted
filesystems that are demand-mounted when first referenced and
unmounted after a period of inactivity. I was wondering if anyone
had used this system in a moderately large (40-50 disks on 10-15 machines) environment and, if so, how efficient and stable they'd found it to be."
Not very good (Score:4, Informative)
At any rate, am-utils failed to properly unmount shares on the SGI and Linux machines, which lead to threadlocks on Ultrix and file-descriptor shortages (followed shortly by VM crashes). Needless to say, this was dropped, and we switched to a combination of WebDAV and shared RAID arrays (distributed clustering and NAS systems were also evaluated and later dropped from consideration, mostly due to cost).
Advice to you? am-utils is not all it seems. Dont forget that NFS is not the only way to get remote file access. Re-evaluate what you need. Sometimes, things as simple as GNOME VFS or Emacs's efs are enough. Otherwise, look at the things I mentioned above.
-rick
AFS anyone (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:AFS anyone (Score:3, Informative)
OpenAFS [openafs.org] baby!
Re:AFS anyone (Score:1)
Pretty satisfactory (Score:4, Interesting)
Am-utils is well suited to what we use it for (or perhaps what we do is determined around what am-utils can do, hmm.) Some examples of what we use it for:
Granted, I'm sure you know of its benefits, but as to its reliability and efficiency, I've got no gripes. Any speed/flakiness issues I've encountered are most likely issues with the underlying NFS implementations, and those have really been pretty few and far between.
Our setup (Score:2, Informative)