Hello again,

Still working at coda, with a little bit more success.
 
Still having a few problems though, and seemingly
random errors.  My biggest problem is constant client
disconnection.  This seems to really only happen on my
2 coda servers. They act as servers and clients.  All
of my other client machines seem relativley stable.

I am attempting to write a Coda Monitoring script,
that will run as a daemon to periodically check the
status of my Coda Filesystem.  It's going well, but I
have a few questions regarding Coda workings...

1) Is it possible to start venus as a normal user,
instead of root ?   The reason I ask is because, when
my script find's a broken client, it ssh's into that
machine and attempts to run the commands below.  It
seems that only root can do this, and I want to avoid
having to ssh into the machine as root.

#Command List (in Order)#
kill -9 `pidof venus`";
/etc/init.d/venus.init stop
/usr/local/coda/sbin/venus -init
/etc/init.d/venus.init stop
umount /coda
/usr/local/coda/sbin/venus
echo -n password | clog -pipe user
cfs cs m1.public m2.public
cfs wr $FSROOT

Currently, if I try to run venus as a normal user I
get this error message:
*******************************************************
17:33:23        0 hdb entries on free-list
17:33:23 Initial LRDB allocation
17:33:23 Mounting root volume...
17:33:23 CHILD: mount system call failed. Killing
parent
*******************************************************

Any idea what would cause this? Would it be a
permissions problem or does coda require root access
to function?

2) What is the preferred method of shutting down
venus?
As it is now, when I kill venus on either of my
servers, I have to venus -init to restart it,
otherwise 
it turns into a zombie.   This does not seem to big as
big a problem on my client machines though. I can't
find anything that seems relevant in the log files.

3) Is there a list of "Connection States", such that
are printed with the command "cfs lv
/coda/storage/..."?  If there are, is there a
preferred method of reconnecting a client, assuming
that the client is anything other than "Connected"?

4) I find that I often have to clog to reconnect a
client to the servers, if I made an update from
another client.  Even if "ctokens" says that my token
is still valid, I can't see the updated files until I
clog again.  First of all, is this the correct
behaviour ?  If not, then is there a way to fix this. 
Also, if the only way to fix this is by revalidating
the token, how often does anyone think should I tell
the clients to revalidate?  If I have several client
revalidating at a frequent rate, I want to try and
avoid overloading the servers and causing more
headaches.

5) My codasrv processes died randomly today on both of
my servers at the same time.  This has happend before,
although not frequently.  I can't find anything in the
log files, and can't seem to reproduce it.  It
happened when I was reconnecting clients to the
servers, I think...    Has anyone seen this before, or
has a guess as to why this might be happening.

6) How much can coda tolerate ?  I mean, can I use it
to do something like run www/mail/ftp services off the
Filesystem "fairly" reliably?  Or am I asking too
much...

The script I am writing will be running on one of the
machines, likley one of the servers, and will be
working through ssh to get the status of the client,
and to fix broken clients.  If all goes well, I might
actually come up with a stable Filesystem.  Any input
is as always, greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

-RD


		
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