On Mon, 2 Jun 2003, Jan Harkes wrote:

> > As a temporary and hackish workaround you might be able to do:
> >
> > ...../realms file:
> > florian     floyd.netego.de      (or what your servers are)
> > texmf.local floyd.netego.de      ( ------ " ------ )
>
> Tread very carefully. You can reach a realm through different names, but
> this is not reliable, as the servers don't realize that the client is
> accessing files from a different context. As a result, the server only
> sends callbacks back to one 'instance' of the realm and the other
> instances will show some stale and invalid state until we reconnect to
> the server.

It would be pretty much ok for read-only access to static data - I have
used such setup for my old (unavoidably path-bound) software collection.
But of course you are right, it should *not* be used.

You see, I have never encouraged it! :-)

> This can be fixed on the server, but it needs some shuffling in the
> connection handling and I wanted to keep the server changes as minimal
> as possible.

No, please, Jan, devote your time to real development instead of
fixing such workarounds! As said, there *are* cleaner workarounds
available when really necessary.

> The realms file really should be used as little as possible, it is only

In my point of view it is a good means for transitional workarounds,
but of course in the long run it should be empty, delegating the cell
resolution to *the* suitable distributed service, dns.

> and can not add IN SRV records to your DNS namespace. Also realm names
> are intentionally fully qualified domain names. I know that with AFS
> there are typically local shortcuts. For instance, at CMU people can use

Thanks for taking it up. Most of users and system administrators as well
are still not accustomed to crossing administration boundaries. It is
*then* one notices the evil side effects of the filetree view
administration on per-client basis (like the shortcuts or say mounting
Coda at a different place than /coda) ...

> local coffeeshop where due to the DHCP settings the fqdn expansion of
> 'cs' would suddenly become 'cs.coffee-isp.com', instead of 'cs.cmu.edu'.

:-)

Best regards,
--
Ivan