[OpenAFS] The status of Windows support...

[Rodney M Dyer]

Hi,

I've been a user of Transarc's AFS for some time now.  Our group started 
back in 1991 on Sun Solaris machines, then in 1997 added Windows NT x86 
machines to our growing network.  We've been using AFS as our core file 
system since the beginning.

Now that Transarc has decided to cease new features to AFS and remain in a 
support service mode of operations we are looking into switching to OpenAFS 
as our future file system.  But, there is a problem.  Since we are moving 
to Windows XP as the primary platform for our PC network we are wondering 
what the level of support will be from the OpenAFS community.

Last week I posted a question to the info list about a problem I am having 
with Windows XP and OpenAFS.  This problem has gone unanswered by the info 
community.  Am I to assume that since this is a Windows problem it will not 
be fixed in a reasonable amount of time, or ever?

I've been going through the list archives trying to determine what the 
status of the AFS community is relative to Windows support.  What I've 
found is disappointing.  It is my impression that there are only a few 
people in the group who know anything about Windows.  Since Windows 
accounts for most of the desktops in our industry it appears that OpenAFS 
might not be a viable file system to use for Windows machines in the 
future.  This would cause a separation of our PC and Unix files.

I personally like AFS and would like to see it continue.  It is the only 
file system available that I know of that will allow a global managed 
namespace with replication and fail-over.  It also has many other features 
that distinguish it among other file systems in the industry.

We are currently in a position to decide on whether we will use OpenAFS for 
our summer XP rollout.  The prognosis at this point is not encouraging.  We 
can currently use Transarc's AFS because it seems to work ok, even though 
it isn't certified for XP compatibility.  On the other hand we could switch 
to OpenAFS, but it doesn't work.

Can I get a heads-up on where OpenAFS is going and why no one has resonded 
to my particular XP problem?  (original problem message at bottom of this mail)

Rodney

Rodney M. Dyer
PC Systems Programmer
College of Engineering Computing Services
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Email rmdyer@uncc.edu
Phone (704)687-3518
Help Desk Line (704)687-3150
FAX (704)687-2352
Office  267 Smith Building

Original message...

Hello,

I'm having a problem with OpenAFS v1.2.3 Windows client on XP.  Our user 
profiles are stored in AFS filespace.  When the users logoff, Windows XP is 
unable to save the profiles back to AFS.  This was working with Transarc's 
version of AFS.  The error windows returns (rather vague) is...

"DETAIL - The specified server cannot perform the requested operation."

At first, I expected to see that the problem was due to OpenAFS not 
supporting Transarc's method LogoffTokenTransferTimeout in "afsd_init.c", 
and that the token was disappearing too soon.  But, this appears not to be 
the case since OpenAFS's version of "afsd_init.c" also contains the code.

User logon works fine, afsd is able to download the user's profile, but 
saving it back seems not to work.  The default value of 10 seconds for 
LogoffTokenTransferTimeout should work just fine.

I'm not sure what to do at this point.  Anybody know what the problem may be?

BTW, I'm using the binary version of OpenAFS right off the site (no 
modifications made).

Thanks,

Rodney