Subject: Re: [netatalk-admins] Whereabouts of AFS
From: Dan Pritts (danno@us.itd.umich.edu)
Date: Wed Apr 15 1998 - 18:16:03 EDT
On 15 Apr 1998, William P. McGonigle wrote:
> It's provided in the UMich distribution because they (presumably) use
> AFS at UMich.
definitely
> Say, for instance, you want AppleShare access to ten different
> machines. Or a hundred machines, or a thousand machines.
> So, you run netatalk on one machine and access the drives on the
> other machines through AFS.
While theoretically accessing afs does allow you to have access to
ten or a hundred or a thousand machines' files, it doesn't work
really as you describe.
In practice, you don't just make j.random.machine an AFS file server
and serve its local files to all the other machines at your
installation; you dedicate machines to afs file service (as well as
authentication and other database services) and store (perhaps all)
your files on the afs servers.
The unix clients see a filesystem tree (usually) mounted under /afs and
can see your AFS cell under, eg, /afs/umich.edu/. Other afs cells are
also available, if their adminisrators have chosen to announce them
and/or aren't filtering out afs traffic on their internet links.
Performance is much better than NFS in WAN applications since each
client has a local disk cache of AFS files. Each server can handle
many many more clients than an NFS server due to the client-side
caching.
There is a Windows NT client as well. Earlier windows and macs must
have some sort of translation done to access files in /afs. samba is
typically used for this for windows; netatalk for macs (cap may work
also, i don't know).
One downside is that the client side of AFS requires significant
kernel-level work, and transarc doesn't support every unix under the
sun (you can, though, make an AFS-NFS translator much like you would
use netatalk), and has had some reliability problems (eg, under solaris
2.3).
dan pritts
734/996-0169
think i'm gonna buy myself a Rolls, maybe a Chevrolet...
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