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

[Susan Midlarsky]

At 4:34 PM -0400 6/9/03, Tim Boyden wrote:
>Susan,
>
>>  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.
>
>I no longer have the script handy for posting, but Al Willis has one
>that would take care of this.

The script took care of most of it, but there were some nightmarish 
trash issues that required me to delete each file one at a time. 
Changing the uid first then running the script before rebooting would 
have prevented this.

>  > 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.
>
>Consider a Firewire or USB drive on keychain for mobile document
>storage. Leave the important system files (like Library) on the Athena
>locker.

I would leave the whole Home directories on the lockers for students. 
They can use CD's or Firewire drives for additional storage if they 
have large files, like they do now. What do you mean by "on 
keychain"? We have too many students to give them all hard drives, or 
even loan them out.
>
>I experience this also on my iBook, the only thing I can think of is the
>AFS drive isn't getting mounted soon enough in the login process. OS X
>is supposed to be able to use the /etc files like unix or linux, so I
>was going to try configuring those similar to a unix or linux box and
>see if it works any better.

Let me know how this goes!

>Unfortunately the setup to make OS X work with AFS just isn't there yet
>(Alpha quality at best) and I think it will require work on Apple's part
>to add native support into OS X for AFS before it is. To get OS X
>machines to work similar to Athena workstations I think MIT I/S will
>need to either setup an LDAP server with updates from Moira or allow
>authentication with the win.mit.edu Windows 2000 domain and take
>advantage of the built-in LDAP and Windows 2000 authentication modules
>in OS X. Once these two pre-requisites are taken care of I think we'll
>have really nice platform option in OS X.

What other complaints do you have? Right now everything else works 
beautifully, i.e. on our system the only thing that doesn't load 
right is these Finder prefs. Otherwise I'm working as usual.

Thanks,
Susan