LDAP/Kerberos user management

[Russ Allbery]

Turbo Fredriksson <turbo at bayour.com> writes:

> AFS is a distributed file system. Hopefully no one will slap me for this
> simplicity, but in my eyes it's "NFS with Kerberos based authentication
> and security".

> Ie, it's encrypted...

Well, it usually isn't encrypted, but other than that, it's a start.

AFS adds a lot more than just Kerberos-based authentication, though.  It's
a cached file system, meaning that there's a client-side cache for
frequently accessed files that speeds up network performance a lot, and
it's location-independent, which means you can move collections of files
between servers arbitrarily and completely transparently from the
perspective of any client.

The latter two features make it a true enterprise file system, which NFS
is not.  NFS is a workgroup file system.  It simply doesn't scale to
multiple terabytes of data, dozens of servers, and thousands of clients in
a single homogenous file system.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>