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

[Susan Midlarsky]

At 8:12 PM -0400 6/9/03, Tim Boyden wrote:
>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.

Yes, there are even better ones that use SD cards for storage so can 
store lots and lots of data. See for example 
http://www.ecost.com/ecost/shop/detail.asp?dpno=445222 .

Didn't understand that's what you meant by a USB key drive. But our 
Architecture students tend to work with really huge media files, so 
usually they need more storage than the average bear. We could try to 
recommend these.

>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

Thanks for the input!

Susan