Chapter 1: Overview

Section 1.1: Introduction

One of the important duties of an AFS system administrator is to insure that processes on file server machines are properly installed and kept running. The BOS Server was written as a tool for assisting administrators in these tasks. An instance of the BOS Server runs on each AFS server machine, and has the following specific areas of responsibility:
Execution of commands on the server machine. An administrator may execute arbitrary unix commands on a machine running the BOS Server.
Unlike many other AFS server processes, the BOS Server does not maintain a cell-wide, replicated database. It does, however, maintain several databases used exclusively on every machine on which it runs.

Section 1.2: Scope

This paper describes the design and structure of the AFS-3 BOS Server. The scope of this work is to provide readers with a sufficiently detailed description of the BOS Server so that they may construct client applications that call the server's RPC interface routines.

Section 1.3: Document Layout

The second chapter discusses various aspects of the BOS Server's architecture. First, one of the basic concepts is examined, namely the bnode. Providing the complete description of a program or set of programs to be run on the given server machine, a bnode is the generic definitional unit for the BOS Server's duties. After bnodes have been explained, the set of standard directories on which the BOS Server depends is considered. Also, the set of well-known files within these directories is explored. Their uses and internal formats are presented. After these sections, a discussion of BOS Server restart times follows. The BOS Server has special support for two commonly-used restart occasions, as described by this section. Finally, the organization and behavior of the bosserver program itself is presented.
The third and final chapter provides a detailed examination of the programmer-visible BOS Server constants and structures, along with a full specification of the API for the RPC-based BOS Server functionality.

Section 1.4: Related Documents

This document is a member of a documentation suite providing programmer-level specifications for the operation of the various AFS servers and agents, and the interfaces they export, as well as the underlying RPC system they use to communicate. The full suite of related AFS specification documents is listed below:
In addition to these papers, the AFS 3.1 product is delivered with its own user, administrator, installation, and command reference documents.

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