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

[Tim Boyden]

As far the USB storage goes:

http://mit.pcconnection.com/scripts/productdetail.asp?product_id=345312

The link is to GovConnection and the CD Cyclone USB 256 Mb Pen Drive. It
costs around $88 and allows you to store up to 256 Mb of data on it. It
connects to any USB port and doesn't require any drivers. The USB pen
drives are usually the size of a keychain and most even come with an
attachment to attach it to a keychain.

As far as complaints go, I don't really have any and may even have been
a bit harsh with my comment about OpenAFS for OS X. OpenAFS once setup
with the correct permissions and what not works fine. However a lot the
local admins of these machines would like them to work like an Athena
workstation and there really isn't any reason why they can't except for
the missing pieces. Ideally we would like any Athena user to be able to
walk up to a Mac OS X machine and login with their Athena username and
password and get their Athena home drive mapped (which is where their
Mac profile would also reside). Even though we already can do that in a
way, the key here is that this would happen on the fly with no user
pre-configuration. It would also be ideal if the configuration info for
this would come from a Hesiod lookup like it does now for Athena
workstations. However this could also be accomplished with an LDAP or
Windows 2000 Domain interface. For Hesiod to work an OpenDirectory
Plug-in would need to be programmed to allow OS X to do Hesiod lookups.
The Hesiod libraries have already been ported and can be used for this
purpose which is half the battle. Once authentication is taken care of,
steps can be made to make Athena software or their equivalents available
in an Athena Services for Mac kind of way. At any rate that's the dream,
we'll see if it becomes a reality.

Tim Boyden
MIT Department of Facilities
Applications & Desktop Services Team


-----Original Message-----
From: macpartners-bounces at MIT.EDU [mailto:macpartners-bounces at MIT.EDU]
On Behalf Of Susan Midlarsky
Sent: Monday, June 09, 2003 5:56 PM
To: macpartners at mit.edu
Subject: RE: [Macpartners] AFS Home Directories on OS X (long)


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
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