[OpenAFS] Some beginner questions

[Andrew Leahy]

Hello,

I've been reading through the "Quick Beginnings" documentation and have
a couple of questions about how AFS operates:

2. Can non-interactive scripts access AFS space?  For instance, is it
possible for root or a generic user to run commands from cron which
access AFS space? I don't see how these scripts would obtain tokens
without someone manually entering in a password at some point.

1. Can a volume mount point be contained within a subdirectory of
another volume? In all of the examples covered in the "Quick Beginnings"
documentation, great care is taken to place a mounted volume immediately
below the root level of another volume--e.g., in "Storing AFS Binaries
in AFS", the sequence of commands is:

vos create machine partition systemname
vos create machine partition systemname.usr
vos create machine partition systemname.usr.afsws
fs mkmount -dir /afs/.cell/systemname -vol sysname
fs mkmount -dir /afs/.cell/systemname/usr -vol sysname.usr
fs mkmount -dir /afs/.cell/systemname/usr/afsws -vol sysname.usr.afsws

As far as I can tell, the systemname and systemname.usr volumes don't
contain anything except other volumes.  Why not just 

mkdir /afs/.cell/systemname
mkdir /afs/.cell/systemname/usr
vos create machine partition systemname.usr.afsws
fs mkmount -dir /afs/.cell/systemname/usr/afsws -vol sysname.usr.afsws

Are there good reasons for creating such a hierarchy of empty volumes?
I'd like to create a set of user volumes which reside in
/afs/cell/home/employee or /afs/cell/home/student and I'm curious if I
should create home, home.employee, and home.student volumes as well.

Thanks for your help.

Andrew Leahy