[OpenAFS-devel] How to mount /home/max on /afs/usr/max

[Harald Barth]

> I have a question on openafs. How can I mount /home/max on
> /afs/usr/max. 

You don't do it that way at all. AFS does not work like NFS where you
export a local file system. Instead in AFS you build a set of volumes
on the AFS server. Then you mount these volumes in a tree which is
rooted in /afs. Then you copy your data into your AFS tree. The server
organizes the volumes in some way on its hard disk. That "file bucket"
is not a file system, just a big bunch of data. When the client
requests the data from the server, the client presents that data in a
file structure again.

You can only access data in AFS space through the AFS client, not like
in NFS both remotely and through the local file system. Of course you
can run a server and a client on a single machine, but there are no
shortcuts to the data other than through the server.

If you want to move your data from /home/max to /afs/usr/max you have
to create a volume (say home.max), mount the volume somewhere (probably
at /afs/yourcell/usr/max) and copy the data there.

Comment in the margin: A bunch of problems with NFS come from the fact
that the data in a NFS exported partition can be changed locally,
bypassing the server.

> Can anyone tell me where is the infomation on which document?

Aside from in some parts outdated (*) AFS FAQ and the intoductions in
the IBM manuals (link from www.central.org), I don't know of any
documentation about the "big picture of AFS".

Harald.

(*)
Archive-name: afs-faq
Version: 1.113
Last-modified: 1950 Thursday 9th July 1998