[OpenAFS] Evaluating OpenAFS: Questions

[Derrick J Brashear]

On Wed, 12 Jan 2005 Jean-Francois.Doyon@CCRS.NRCan.gc.ca wrote:

> Derrick,
>
> Great information! Thank you very much.
>
> Personally, I'm biased towards Zope for web application frameworks.  I also
> love Python :)

Python seems to be popular for geospatial data.

> This doesn't worry me too much though, for now at least I'm going to limit
> my interest to automating basic OAFS features only, and I can use Perl or
> Java for that (Tasks such as registering/adding a new "data provider" to the
> system for example, and triggering data replication based on such an event).
> Also I suppose that if there are such bindings I could write Python ones
> based on that.
>
> Is there an API reference somewhere?

Only an outdated one, unfortunately, unless someone wants to contradict 
me?

> Authentication: I have to admit I'm not up to speed on the details of
> authentication.  Here's the end-result I would hope to achieve:  Users can
> log into their Windows workstations and map a drive to the distributed
> filesystem.  To keep things easy for everyone, they mount this drive through
> standard windows methods, which means through SMB.  I would therefore
> imagine a server that is AFS aware mounting the AFS and then sharing it back
> out as a samba share for example.  This also works nicely to get around
> security domain issues.  Problem is how to keep the users synched, if at all
> necessary.  There is obviously no need to have a 1:1 equivalency. most users
> would probably simply have a readonly type access, that can all be done
> under the same user.

I can't comment to this, but

> I use Windows here, but it could just as well be a Solaris server running
> GIS software that needs access to it, and user log into this machine
> normally by being authenticated through NIS or something like that.

Well, Solaris can use PAM, you can use nis for passwd lookup but pam to 
authenticate the user, and all would be well.

> Ah, well I'm glad to hear others have applied this type of tool to
> geospatial data! I'd love to hear succes tories in this field specifically.
> To get geospatial for a moment: I plan on putting OGC Web Services (At
> least) on top of this data, such a WMS, WFS, and so on ... As well as a
> registry.

mapserver, or something else?