[Macpartners] AFS Home Directories on OS X (long)

[Susan Midlarsky]

Dear MacPartners,

I've been trying out the afs home directory setup as a possible login 
solution for our Mac OS X labs, using my own production environment 
as the guinea pig (yes, I'm brave - or stupid?). Anyway, so far most 
things are working, and I thought to let you know about the "gotchas" 
along the way, plus a few questions for people who might be farther 
along the road than I.

Gotchas:

1) In Netinfo Manager, when changing the UID (numerical) to match the 
Athena UID, you *must* do this before logging into afs the first 
time. Otherwise it becomes a nightmare of ownership and permissions 
problems.

2) I did have to run Repair Permissions from the CD after installing 
OpenAFS etc. before everything would work right. Running it from a 
Firewire drive wasn't adequate.

3) When restoring files from TSM, the files automatically get 
restored as owned by the other admin account uid on the system, and I 
have to change each file that is restored. Otherwise there is no 
permission to access the files.

4) Athena has a current quota of 200 MB on the home directories. My 
home directory is much larger. To get around the problem, I created 
aliases to my local home directory on the afs home directory. This 
worked in all cases except with the Library (see questions below). It 
shouldn't be a problem for student users, but we should have the 
option to create aliases to another network space if it is. We have 
not tried this yet and may not need to with larger Athena quotas.

Questions/Glitches:

1) If I reboot my machine and login, none of the Finder or Dock prefs 
load from my settings. If I logout and log back in, the desktop and 
window prefs reload, but my Dock prefs are toast. Also, I can never 
get my custom keyboard layout to stick. Relaunching the Finder 
doesn't help.

To try to solve this, I first moved the real Library folder on afs, 
and that seemed to work. Unfortunately this was only true for logouts 
and logins, but not for cold boots or reboots. Right now my 
workaround is to restore my dock settings from a TSM backed up file, 
but obviously that is not a permanent solution or one for the 
students.

Has anyone else a) seen this, b) know what causes it, and/or c) know 
how to fix it?

2) There are a few patches on the kfm_aklog site for OpenAFS. Has 
anyone compiled any of these with OpenAFS? Do they help? Any other 
gotchas?

The patches are:
afsd.patch
macosx.patch
permission.patch
rc.patch

from http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~akosut/software/


Thanks much for any advice.

Susan
-- 
...............................................
Susan Midlarsky, Assistant Network Manager
http://architecture.mit.edu/resourcs/cro/index.html
Dept. of Architecture, MIT
77 Massachusetts Ave., Bldg. 3-411
Cambridge, MA 02139