[OpenAFS] Performance over SMB

[Jeffrey Hutzelman]

On Thu, 28 Feb 2002, Jacob Gorm Hansen wrote:

> 0) How does performance compare with standard windows file sharing?
>
> 1) How much slower is accessing locally cached files, than accessing the local
> file system, on Win2k?

Since I neither use Windows heavily nor have much interaction with users
here who do, I can't give useful answers to your performance questions.

> 2) I keeping one or more standby replicas (which might be accessed RO) up to
> date possibly, and relatively easy?

Yes; AFS is designed to do this.  Creating RO replicas is easy (two
commands, issued by an administrator from any machine).  RO volumes are
updated only on explicit "release" operations, which can be done by an
administrator at any time, or you can set up an automatic process to
release replicated volumes on a regular basis.  Client load is
automatically shared between accessible RO clones, and if one server
fails, clients will automatically fail over to the next.  The RW copy is
normally accessed only on explicit user request, but you can and should
put an RO clone on the same disk as the RW very low overhead.

> 3) Has anyone had success authenticating towards a Win2k KDC (active directory),
> automatically at logon?

This is theoretically possible, but getting it working is a bit confusing.
There are probably others on this list who can provide some advice on how
best to do this.

> 4) Is AFS considered secure (code quality, krb4 security issues) enough that
> you might allow access from outside the corporate firewall?

What's a corporate firewall? :-)
Seriously, we've been running AFS on open-access university networks for
over a decade, and while I know of a few possible denial-of-service
attacks against AFS fileservers, I've never seen a concentrated attack,
and I can think of no cases in which we've suffered a more serious attack
in which a security problem with AFS was a factor.

-- Jeffrey T. Hutzelman (N3NHS) <jhutz+@cmu.edu>
   Sr. Research Systems Programmer
   School of Computer Science - Research Computing Facility
   Carnegie Mellon University - Pittsburgh, PA