Specific & Technical

AFS at IPP/RZG

Some information about IPP specific details of the AFS.

Home directories

Every user registered at RZG has a home-volume, which is mounted as her/his home-directory.

There are two places, where your home-volume is mounted :

/afs/ipp-garching.mpg.de/u/<username> or /afs/ipp-garching.mpg.de/home/<first letter of username>/<username>

Working in either of these directories is completely equivalent.

Recovering just deleted/corrupted files (RO-Volumes)

Home Volumes

As briefly described in understanding AFS, all Volumes at IPP have a READ-ONLY copy. This RO (read-only) copy of the Volumes is refreshed (“The RW-Volume is released” in AFS-speak) every day by a cron-job.

The RO of your home-Volume (home-directory) is mounted /afs/ipp-garching.mpg.de/.u/<username>.

For windows: \\AFS\ipp-garching.mpg.de\.u\<username>

Please note the dot before the “u”.

This gives you the possibility to browse through a snapshot of your home-directory which is up to 24hours old and recover data which just got missing.

More information about recovering older files than this is given under
Data -> Backup in the navigation column on the left.

Project Volumes

For the RO-Replics of project-Volumes, we have (currently) no fixed mountpoints.

Thus, you need to create your own mountpoint directly to the RO-Volume in order to access it.

For this, you need the “a” right on the volume.

Example:

Say, there are some files missing in /afs/ipp/common/soft/openafs.

If you have this, you can do the following :

  1. get the volume name, where the files have been :
    fs listquota /afs/ipp/common/soft/openafs
    gives you the volume name “openafs”

  2. Mount the readonly Volume somewhere in AFS:
    cd /afs/ipp-garching.mpg.de/u/USERNAME
    fs mkmount openafs.RO openafs.readonly

  3. Done! now in /afs/ipp-garching.mpg.de/u/USERNAME/openafs.RO
    you have access to the files of yesterday night.

  4. After copying over the files, you can remove this mountpoint again :
    fs rmmount openafs.RO