[OpenAFS] Re: home directories in AFS

[Samuel L. Bayer]

Hi all -

I thought I'd share a little experience with using OpenAFS for my home
directory on MacOS X 10.2.6. I'm also subscribing to our Solaris NIS
server for password authentication.

In general, the configuration is *reasonably* reliable. However, it's
not quite ready for prime time, for the following reasons:

(1) There doesn't really appear to be support for PAM authentication
    in MacOS X yet, and that means that there's a point where I'm
    logged in, but have no write permissions. This can be a problem if
    any login items try to write to any files. It's also annoying
    having to open the Terminal to klog every time I log in.

(2) I occasionally have a problem where my System Preferences Screen
    Effects pane will hang, and at the same time, Logout or Restar
    from the Apple menu will simply fail to do anything. I can't find
    any indication of a problem in the system logs, and if I force a
    logout by killing the loginwindow process and log in as admin,
    there's no problem. I'm convinced that this has something to do
    with the AFS/NIS configuration, but the only evidence I have is
    that the AFS-mounted user has the problem (intermittently) and the
    non-AFS-mounted user never does.

Other than these problems, I'm extremely happy with the
configuration. 

Sam Bayer