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How Efficient/Stable are the am-utils?

Posted by Cliff on from the seeking-user-experiences dept.

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."

3 of 10 comments (clear)

  1. Not very good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    I used to use them on my combined network of Sun Ultra2s, Linux-based PCs, and the occasional older SGI. We tried to switch to am-utils to cut down on the network connections and excess traffic created by buggy NFS implementations (eg, those found in Linux kernel-based implementations (the two user-land implementations we later tried were fine, i fogget what either of them is called))

    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

  2. Re:AFS anyone by O · · Score: 3, Informative

    Hell yeah
    OpenAFS baby!

    --

    1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 -- Mathematics is the Language of Nature.
  3. Our setup by JimMcCusker · · Score: 2, Informative

    Our department in our company has about 30 Solaris machines with about 15 Linux (Mandrake and Red Hat) machines set up with NIS, NFS, and auto-fs (on linux) and automount on Solaris. We have had this set up for longer than I've been there (~3 years). I know of no problems with this system. Using this system allows us to have centralized home directories by default and allow some users (myself included) to have local home directories, because some of us are developing very IO-intensive applications. We are all able to log into any other machine with no trouble, and am-utils has been essential to our linux setup and has only given us one problem: one fellow, who has a very unconventional home directory setup, has managed to make autofs 4.0.0 barf consistently on it. The 3.x series has no trouble.