Hello,

may I please confront you with a problem we are having:

A new bug (as we see it) or a newly discontinued undocumented feature (as
IBM see it) in ADSM clients inhibits the use of ADSM in computing
environments that employ the distributed file systems AFS or DCE/DFS
unless the deployment of these file systems is restricted to AIX clients.

Affected are sites that deploy AFS or DFS on non-AIX hosts that have
also ADSM installed.

The problem is that an archived file may or may not be retrievable under
the name under which it was archived, and the "may not" case is currently
the typical behaviour observed. A suitably instructed user may, however,
be able to detect his or her file elsewhere.

As the problem is modest-looking on the first glance but exhibits most
calamitious consequences when the implications are considered, I have
prepared an elaborate description as
http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/ALESia/papers/afsbug.html (The name "ALESia" is
temporary while "ALES" is being reconfigured; I will, however, take care
that the URL remains valid for quite some time.)

We consider the problem grave enough to consider ADSM as no longer
suitable for sites having AFS or DFS installed unless the installation is
ready to restrict themselves to the exclusive usage of AIX systems - for
now and the future.

If any of the readers has any idea how we could proceed with ADSM (we have
currently 160 million files (= 47 TByte) stored there), we would be more
than grateful.

Best regards,

Helmut Richter

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Dr. Helmut Richter                       Leibniz-Rechenzentrum
Tel:   +49-89-289-28785                  Barer Str. 21
Fax:   +49-89-2809460                    D-80333 Muenchen
Email: Helmut.Richter AT lrz-muenchen DOT de    Germany
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