[OpenAFS] OpenAFS Newbie Questions

[Michael Robokoff]

Raymond wrote:

>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 with an 
>AFS volume. Redhat will be reloaded soon with all partitions recreated and 
>formated with ext3 or reiserfs. The primary use of this machine will be to 
>share user data located on this machine. The /home partition is typically 
>structured as /home/<org unit>/<user>/ with public, protected and private 
>subdirectories. The clients are all Win2K machines spread across a continent 
>via T1 and DS3 wan.
>
>1) Is the vicex partition where all the user (/home) data is stored. If so, 
>can I  create a /vicea partition in lieu of the /home partition during RH73 
>installation? 
>
Yes. But I am not sure I would not create the /home partition anyway and 
make it small.

>When creating a new user via console useradd or kde's kuser, 
>would the home directory be /vicea/usr/<org unit>/<user>/ or 
>/afs/<cell>/usr/<org unit>/<user>/  ?
>
/afs/<cell>/usr/<org unit>/<user>/

>2) After perusing the list archives, it appears only ext2 is guaranteed to 
>work with the client cache. Therefore, is it advisable to create a 100+ meg 
>ext2 /usr/afs/cache  partition during RH73 installation?
>
We use ext3.

>3) I wish to replicate the /vicea partition to a geographically remote machine 
>for fault-tolerance. Is this easily achievable?
>
Not for home directories. This can be done easily for readonly volumes.
We have a number of remote sites accessing their home directories across 
t1's

>4) Is the OpenAFS Windoz client similar to the Transarc client outlined in the 
>Transarc documentation?
>
Similar but better.

>5) I currently utilize pam for all user application authentication to the 
>system. Does the RH73 RPM version of OpenAFS support this? Is Kerberos 
>implicitly utilized to create an encryption *hash" or should I wrap OpenAFS 
>file transfers with SSH2?
>
I don't know this we are still using RH72.

--Mike