[OpenAFS] Q: OpenAFS for MacOS X.2

[Prof. Thomas Stricker" <tomstr@inf.ethz.ch]

Hi Rubino,

Open AFS runs fine with the Mac OS upgrades up to 10.1.5. However there
are some issues with the full integration. Oops... I see you wrote
X.2 (and are probably referring to Jaguar). But what does the
downgrading mean...

Back at Carnegie Mellon I ran a DEC Alpha UNIX workstation and Mac on my
desk, an became very familiar with AFS. I would love to see all issues
with MacOS X and AFS properly worked out. Some issues include:

 1. From the Command Line (Shell Windows) AFS works perfectly.  There
    is a little issue with propagating AFS rights to the finder,
    especially if you do not login into the machine frequently and a
    token expires (like my on desktop that is running in my office 24
    hrs a day with autologin). Sometimes I have to restart the finder to
    get AFS access back e.g. after the token expires and I re-klog.

    There were two flavors of AFS clients in the past. Those who
    propagate AFS rights after a klog to all processes on one machine
    and those who propagate the to the process subtree of the shell
    that generated the token. On a personal computer like a Mac the
    first flavor is preferred, on a big time sharing machine the
    second one is better. I think and I hope for the Mac OS X client 
    that it is a clean implementation of the first flavor.

2.  There are some subtle issues with login module and home
    directories. I had to set my user account to the same numerical
    userid than on AFS - so importing all the users from LDAP or Kerberos is
    almost a must. 
    
    Our facilities folks are thinking hard about such a solution,
    since we also have a campus wide AFS for all our >20k staff and
    students here at ETH and would like to integrate MacOS.

All in all it would be very desirable to have seamless AFS and MacOS X
support since then our people would have an enviroment with all the
strength of UNIX and all the popular applications from MS Word to Adobe
Photoshop, this unique and new!

Best regards
Prof. Thomas M. Stricker
ETH Zuerich