How Efficient/Stable are the am-utils?

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."

Comments

Pretty satisfactory

[psmith]

Our environment in my department at Purdue uses am-utils extensively for our NFS handling. Home directories, group file repositories, and shared software installation.

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:

• Home directories. Home directories come from either of two central fileservers (with the RAID), or if the user's a disk hog, their home directory can be served from their workstation. Amd lets us just forget where something is physically stored and let amd deal with finding /home/psmith. Our group file storage areas work the same way.
• Shared software installation. Rather than install matlab, OpenPBS, PVM, MPICH, etc. on every system, am-utils lets us install software in a common amd mountpoint, and amd handles the behind-the-scenes stuff to make sure it mounts the version for the proper architecture. Basically, it maps people's requests for /package/matlab to fileserver:/net/fileserver/package/matlab/${os}

Add in the cross-platform-ness (we mix SunOS, Solaris, FreeBSD, Linux, and AIX in our am-utils environment), and I'm most pleased with it.

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.