[OpenAFS] home on afs woes

[Jeffrey Hutzelman]

On Thursday, January 05, 2006 04:21:52 PM -0500 Rodney M Dyer 
<rmdyer@uncc.edu> wrote:

> Wasn't there some talk about the DFS code being opened?  And didn't DFS
> have file level ACLs?  Could any of that code be ported to AFS, or is
> there already a project underway for file level ACLs in AFS?

The AFS and DFS codebases are really not very similar.
So no, there's not really anything to be gained from DFS here.

I don't think I know of any current work to provide file-level ACL's in 
AFS.  Doing so would certainly require changes to the way the fileserver 
stores per-file metadata, which means issues dealing with upgrades, and all 
sorts of other fun.  Obviously, this is something we'd prefer to do only 
once.

There certainly have been some thoughts in the direction of extending the 
fileserver's metadata format, but I would not expect any serious work in 
that direction to happen until after several similar transitions earlier in 
the queue, such as extensions to the PRDB format (to support mapping 
authentication identities to AFS ID's), the AFS directory format (to 
support unicode filenames and >64K files per directory), and possibly to 
the VLDB (to support IPv6 and/or per-fileserver service keys).

-- Jeff