On Sat, 12 Jul 1997, Bradley C. Kuszmaul wrote:

> My coda client is now working against the testserver.
> 
> Now my next step will be get a server running.
>  (a) Are there any gotchas or other steps missing from the Sysadmin
>      manual?

I recommend following Peter's instructions in /usr/doc/coda-*/INSTALL. 
(At least, I think that's the file.)  I was able to set up a server on my
machine, and a local client pointing at it, without difficulty.  Actually,
I did have some difficulty because the first time around I didn't have bc
installed (I thought I did, but I didn't).  The server setup scripts use
bc for certain calculations and leave the configuration files in a weird
state if they crash due to lack of bc.  After installing bc and cleaning
up, then installation went without a hitch.  So, the key is to make sure
that you do have bc installed.  (INSTALL does specifically warn you about
it, btw!)

>  (b) Will I be OK running a client and a server on the same machine?

I've had no problems.

>  (c) Some questions that come to my mind include
>        Should my /vicepa /vicepb etc partitions be formatted?  
>        I guess /vicepa sits on top of what looks like a unix partition?

Yes.  In Linux, in fact, the server uses only normal filesystem calls on
/vicepx partitions.  Historically (in Mach), Vice would access its
container files using a special iopen() system call to open files by inode
number--a performance win because it avoids namei().  The upshot, though,
is that on Linux /vicepa is a normal filesystem.  (On Mach, it is
essentially a normal filesystem, but with a lot of apparently lost inodes
which don't appear in the directory hierarchy but are referred to in
Vice's RVM data.) 

If you just want to play around with a small server (say 10MB or so), I
recommend following the advice of INSTALL and using a loopback device to
mount a regular file as a filesystem.

Michael