[OpenAFS-devel] Regarding Gsoc 2025

[Michael Meffie]

On Sat, 1 Mar 2025 22:35:33 +0530
Praver Bajaj <praverbajaj1609@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi, I'm Praver, a 3rd-year B.E. student interested in developing a GNOME
> Shell Extension for OpenAFS as part of GSoC 2025. This project aims to
> simplify OpenAFS management by integrating it into the GNOME desktop
> environment.

Hello Praver! Thank you for your interest in OpenAFS.

> I’d love to get feedback on my approach and understand the best practices
> for handling OpenAFS authentication securely within a GNOME extension. Any
> guidance or resources would be greatly appreciated.
> Questions for Mentors
> Are there existing GNOME Shell extensions related to OpenAFS that can be
> referenced?

There are currently none that I am aware of. There are several existing
GNOME extension for managing Kerberos tickets which may be useful if you
are interested in providing an interface to manage OpenAFS authentication
tokens.

> What is the best way to handle OpenAFS authentication securely within a
> GNOME extension?

OpenAFS authenticated access requires the user to obtain a Kerberos ticket
and then an OpenAFS token from the Kerberos ticket. The OpenAFS token
is usually created using the "aklog" which uses a system call to inject
the token into the kernel module. 

> Would integrating D-Bus for better system interactions be recommended over
> system calls?

The OpenAFS cache manager is normally started on bootup with systemd
on Linux distributions. It may be useful to be able to start and
stop the cache manager from the GNOME interface, although shutdown
means the user can not be using any files in the OpenAFS filesystem
when in order to do a shutdown. 

> Should the extension follow any specific GNOME UI/UX guidelines?

I would expect so, but we are not GNOME developers so cannot provide any
guidance on that.

> How should the extension be tested across different GNOME versions?

I imagine containers or virtual machines could be used for testing different
versions.

Best regards,
Mike

-- 
Michael Meffie <mmeffie@sinenomine.net>