LDAP/Kerberos user management
Russ Allbery
rra at stanford.edu
Tue Aug 27 01:45:33 EDT 2002
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/>
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