Hi Greg,

On Tue, Jun 14, 2005 at 03:47:16PM -0400, Greg Troxel wrote:
> Is there any real benefit to making LOG and DATA be bona fide
> partitions on the disk, rather than partitions backed by files?

at least on Linux files are nowadays preferable to partitions.

You certainly would not loose a lot by using files, on any reasonable system.

> This server was initialized a really long time ago, perhaps 1998 to
> 2000 or so, which is a testament to codasrv format stability.

It would be excitiong to hear what was the usage pattern?

> I could also make backups and restore them.  One thing I'm not clear
> on is that restoring backups seems to make a new readonly volume, and
> I don't see how to turn that back into a rw volume like I want.  Is
> there a script to take a backup file and a target volume name (e.g
> u.gdt) and create it replicated/rw on the server?  Or do I have to

I do not think there is such recipe/script yet. Restores give you
a readonly copy of the data.

> rsync from the read-only restored volume?  and then what about acls?

You can certainly use some shell script to recursively go through
a volume and set the same acls on another one. Never done it myself though.

If your server can stay up a little bit more,
the best migration option available today is to expand the replica
lists for the volumes, create replicas on another server and populate them
via server-server resolution, according to

  http://coda.wikidev.net/Dynamically_add_replicated_server

Then you can shut down your old server and replace it with another new one,
repeating the procedure - or reduce the replica counts on the volumes
(has anybody tried that?).

The process does not imply copying any files or acls explicitely,
though you will want to hack some fancy scripts to automatically
create the replicas.

Such scripts, being reasonably generic, would be a nice contribution
to Coda admin tools.

Regards,
--
Ivan