Problems with TCF.

[Bart De Decker]

I am having serious problems with TCF.

Current configuration
	1 PS/2 - Model 80 - A31 (primary)
	1 PS/2 - Model 80 - 311 (backbone)
	21 PS/2 - Model 80 - 041 (secondaries)
	all connected via a tokenring network.

I finally succeeded in installing AIX version 1.2 on the primary and transferred
the root file system with TCF to the backbone and the secondaries.
(Boy, is the installation procedure badly documented! If something goes wrong,
you're stuck, and have to figure it out all by yourself.
One undocumented bug is the length of the machine-name. The docs say that
upto 12 characters are allowed. Our primary site has a name of 8 characters.
Now, in the /etc/newsite script, the rdf command is used to find the primary.
However, rdf truncates names after 7 characters.)

I had to intervene manually in order to adjust the fstore values, since the
root file system on the secondaries is only 28 Mbytes large.
The secondaries boot now without a problem. However, after a few minutes,
a high disk activity, which repeats every ten minutes or so, makes these
computers completely useless. If you unfortunately started a command that is
not on the local disk or needs access to the primary's disk, you have to wait
minutes before something seems to happen ...
On the console of the primary, a bunch of error messages appear:

	**DATE** newcss: fails, interrupted by toperror (or something like that)

What does it mean? What is going wrong?
Moreover, the same problem occurs with the backbone. Only now, the disk activity
is much heavier, and the primary server seems paralysed during these file
transfers.  What do I have to do to stop this awkward behaviour?

Also, if a similar configuration exists somewhere and is working, I'd like to
hear about the sizes of the different file systems, the /etc/rc.* (what
daemons are started), etc.

Please use e-mail since I do not have the time to read this newsgroup
regularly. If there is some interest from the net, I'll post a summary
of the replies I got.

-- Bart De Decker --
bart at cs.kuleuven.ac.be
K.U.Leuven, Department of Computer Science, Celestijnenlaan 200A,
B-3001 Heverlee (LEUVEN), BELGIUM
-- 
Bart De Decker                 | Katholieke Universiteit Leuven  
bart at cs.kuleuven.ac.be         | Department of Computer Science 
FHGAA27 at BLEKUL11               | Celestijnenlaan 200 A 
Tel: +(32) 16 20 10 15 x3633   | B-3001 Leuven (Heverlee), Belgium