[OpenAFS] Info on AFS

Charles Clancy security@xauth.net
Tue, 11 Dec 2001 02:12:15 -0600 (CST)


Probably a bit out of date:
http://www.angelfire.com/hi/plutonic/afs-faq.html

Answers to some questions below.  Left unanswered are mostly ambiguous,
unapplicable questions, and ones I don't know the answers to.

> *	what are the storage technologies  (about FCP, iSCSI, iSNS, FCIP)
> supported by AFS?

Anything supported by the OS, in general, that you can mount and create a
filesystem on.  I've used fibre channel drives and local SCSI drives on
Sparcs with much success.

> *	How it coexist with CIFS, NFS, FTP, HTTP, HTTPS?

In what way?  Authentication or file-system access?  Generally, AFS
supercedes NFS.  I've used AFS with Samba, FTP (Sun), and HTTP (Apache)
without problems.

> *	What are the user interfaces or APIs available to monitor AFS
> administration? any browser sort of thing is availbale to access the
> parameters?

Well, there's those shared libraries.  Are those things working yet?

> *	How AFS behaves with respect to shared Drive?
> *	How AFS supports compression?

It doesn't.  Not even on backups. :(

> *	what are the industry standard tools available for AFS?
> *	What are the open protocols availble for AFS?
> *	How you can rate AFS with respect to interoperatability?

Good OS suppport in my opinion.  Getting better and better.

> *	disaster Recovery in AFS?

Well, reinstall the OS, restore /usr/afs from tape, then restore volumes
from tape.

> *	fault management in AFS?
> *	How u can explain Routing, Bandwidth, with respect to AFS?
> *	Howz device management, Device monitoiring in AFS?
> *	Howz Media management, Media monitoring in AFS?
> *	Faster retrieval and storage?
> *	Performance?
> *	searching capability?

find /afs

> *	Replication?

You can easily replicate RO versions of volumes across multiple partitions
and servers.

> *	Automatic Data migration?

Umm... no.  I personally wouldn't want my data moving around without me
saying so.

> *	Migration to different media?

Like what exactly?  Floppy?

> *	Virus protection?

It's a filesystem.  That's not its job.

> *	Encryption?

Yes, but not by default.

> *	Security?

Buch better than NFS, in my opinion.

> *	Acess control?

Directory level only.

> *	Huge file support?

How big is huge?

--
t. charles clancy <> tclancy@uiuc.edu <> www.uiuc.edu/~tclancy