Subject: Re: [netatalk-admins] Whereabouts of AFS
From: William P. McGonigle (William.P.McGonigle@Hitchcock.ORG)
Date: Wed Apr 15 1998 - 16:58:05 EDT
--- Tony Moran wrote:
Oh..ok.. (showing his ingenue now) So how come support for it is provided
for it in Asuns 1.4b2 distribution - where does AFS fit into the Netatalk
picture ?
--- end of quote ---
Strictly, it's provided in the asun distribution because it's provided in the UMich distribution.
It's provided in the UMich distribution because they (presumably) use AFS at UMich.
Say, for instance, you want AppleShare access to ten different machines. Or a hundred machines, or a thousand machines.
You probably don't want to run that many copies of netatalk.
So, you run netatalk on one machine and access the drives on the other machines through AFS.
Why AFS and not, say NFS? For one, it supports Kerberos principals for file permissions.
Say you have an insanely huge number of users, like hundreds of thousands. You want to store those users' names and passwords exactly once so you don't need an army of account administrators. Then you use a UAM that authenticates you off of Kerberos for access to netatalk.
One name and password works everywhere. Slick, eh?
-Bill
PS AFS now stands for AFS. It used to stand for Andrew File System, then Transarc bought it so it's not part of Andrew (CMU) anymore.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b28 : Sat Dec 18 1999 - 16:32:22 EST