[OpenAFS] OpenAFS Newbie Questions

[Raymond]

As a newbie to AFS, I am unclear on much of AFS

I have a RH73 server and wish to replace the /home directory and mount wi=
th an=20
AFS volume. Redhat will be reloaded soon with all partitions recreated an=
d=20
formated with ext3 or reiserfs. The primary use of this machine will be t=
o=20
share user data located on this machine. The /home partition is typically=
=20
structured as /home/<org unit>/<user>/ with public, protected and private=
=20
subdirectories. The clients are all Win2K machines spread across a contin=
ent=20
via T1 and DS3 wan.

1) Is the vicex partition where all the user (/home) data is stored. If s=
o,=20
can I  create a /vicea partition in lieu of the /home partition during RH=
73=20
installation? When creating a new user via console useradd or kde's kuser=
,=20
would the home directory be /vicea/usr/<org unit>/<user>/ or=20
/afs/<cell>/usr/<org unit>/<user>/  ?

2) After perusing the list archives, it appears only ext2 is guaranteed t=
o=20
work with the client cache. Therefore, is it advisable to create a 100+ m=
eg=20
ext2 /usr/afs/cache  partition during RH73 installation?

3) I wish to replicate the /vicea partition to a geographically remote ma=
chine=20
for fault-tolerance. Is this easily achievable?

4) Is the OpenAFS Windoz client similar to the Transarc client outlined i=
n the=20
Transarc documentation?

5) I currently utilize pam for all user application authentication to the=
=20
system. Does the RH73 RPM version of OpenAFS support this? Is Kerberos=20
implicitly utilized to create an encryption *hash" or should I wrap OpenA=
FS=20
file transfers with SSH2?

Thanks in advance.

Raymond