[OpenAFS] Drive mapping difficulties in Windows

[Peter Schüller]

Hello,

I have (and always have had) some difficulties with drive mappings with AFS in 
WIndows under certain circumstances. Only this time I was not able to fix it.

The problem is that settings pertaining to drive mappings do not seem to be 
associated with the *account* when it should and the *machine* when it 
should; it's kind of a mish-mash it seems.

Suppose I have user USER on machine MACHINE mapping drive X: to /afs. This 
works fine. Then USER moves over to machine MACHINE-2 and tries to log in; 
and now there is a stuck non-functinal drive mapping at X: to MACHINE-AFS; 
and hence the AFS client on MACHINE-2 fails to map the drive correctly for 
*that* machine.

In the past I have gotten around this by simply not mapping drives at all in 
the user settings; but rather only mapping global drives. This worked, until 
today when I added a third client machine at the location in question (it's a 
off-site office where people switch computers back and forth, which isn't the 
case at the main office).

On the new machine, I have so far been unable to make the global drive 
mappings have an effect (they just don't get mapped - I have no clue why). In 
other words, in order to have any mappings at all by default, I need to 
configure them on a per-user level; which causes the above problem when the 
user switches machine.

The new machine is running AFS 1.2.10; the others 1.2.8a. I don't know if that 
is the reason for the change in behavior. I may try going back to 1.2.8a, but 
that would be a shame.

I have tried disabling all the  AFS control center drive mappins alltogheter, 
and letting Wake do the mapping. This didn't work either however, since Wake 
too seems to not quite be decided on wheather a setting is per-user or 
per-machine (the "map defaults drivers" option seems to be per-user, but the 
actual drives to be mapped is on a per-machine basis editable with regedit, 
but then there is a problem with these "submount" names used for the mounting 
which cannot be changed by the user... or something like that, I don't quite 
remember).

I guess my question is: What am I supposed to do? How do other people handle 
this? I am assuming there are lots of people adminning sites with users using 
random machines to access their AFS data. Am I perpetually doing something 
wrong? Missing something?

My needs are very basic: Regardless of which machine a user logs in with, I 
want one single drive mapping set up - in this case we've been using N: 
mapped to /afs.  Nothing more complicated than that is required; it's just 
that it breaks when users switch machines.

Thanks!

(Note: At no time is AFS actually non-functional; it's just that it requires a 
lot of fiddling each time one changes computer (removing bogus share; 
fiddling with drive mapping settings, etc). To me, this would be highly 
annoying but usable; but to the average computer user it's equivalent of not 
working at all.)

-- 
/ Peter Schuller, InfiDyne Technologies HB

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