[OpenAFS] Boxed Penguin Prototype demonstrates easy AFS cell setup

[Sam Hartman]

Boxed Penguin (http://www.boxedpenguin.com) is working to develop
infrastructure software.  We'd like to draw your attention to our
initial prototype, based on Debian GNU/Linux, available at our
website.  The prototype demonstrates how a site could combine various
components of Debian together to set up an infrastructure.  AFS is
used as a secure, distributed file system for the site's data.
Kerberos acts as a central authentication service.  SASL and PAM are
used to provide security to applications like LDAP and IMAP.  LDAP is
used to provide a means for distributing account information.


While designing the prototype, we worked to make the AFS cell setup
painless and easy.  As questions on this list indicate, setting up an
AFS cell for the first time can be fairly confusing.  While
documentation is provided, the documentation makes the unfortunate
assumption that the cell will be using kaserver.  We do not want to
encourage new sites to deploy Kerberos version 4.

Boxed Penguin provides a better solution to AFS cell creation.  In
addition to integrating the cell creation with setting up a Kerberos
version 5 realm, Boxed Penguin scripts the install so that the user
does not have to manually create the initial volumes.

Hopefully, our work will help focus effort on making AFS cell creation
easier in all environments as well as focusing on Kerberos5
integration.

Thanks,

--Sam