In a cluster setup, when a Macintosh client connects to the physical IP of the AFP server, both the local volumes and the cluster-enabled shared volumes are exported to the client.
However, if the client connects to the cluster/virtual IP, then only the cluster-enabled shared volumes associated with the cluster IP are exported.
For example, consider a cluster setup with two AFP servers running on nodes A and B. If the cluster resource is bound to node A, a Mac client connecting to the physical IP of node A can access both the local and the cluster-enabled shared volumes.
If the client connects to the physical IP of node B, then only local volumes on node B are exported, because the cluster resource is now on node A. However, if the cluster resource moves to node B because of migration or failover, then clients connecting to node B can see both local and shared volumes.
NSS volumes are identified by the machine name and volume name combination. For instance, if you create a volume titled AFP_Volume on a server named ACME, the volume is represented as ACME.AFP_Volume. The Volume Name Management feature helps you specify an alternate name for the NSS volume. For instance, you can rename ACME.AFP_Volume to AFP_Volume. This is mandatory in a cluster setup where you need to identify volumes without the machine name prefix
The following example illustrates how cluster nodes map to shared volumes.
Example 3: Renaming cluster volumes afpvols.conf for serverA: serverA.vol1 sharedVol1 serverA.vol2 sharedVol2 afpvols.conf for serverB: serverB.vol1 sharedVol1 serverB.vol2 sharedVol2
Volume management is done in two ways in a cluster:
By using the iManager AFP Management plug-in:
The iManager AFP Management plug-in requires a volume to be locally mounted on the cluster node before adding it to the AFP configuration. You migrate the volume resource to each node and use the iManager AFP Management plug-in to add the volume to the AFP configuration.
By editing the /etc/opt/novell/afptcpd/afpvols.conf on each cluster node. This is done without migrating the resource to each node. Use the following syntax: ServerName.VolumeName VolumeName.
Replace ServerName with the host name of the local cluster node and replace VolumeName with the name of the shared, cluster-enabled volume.