[OpenAFS] Data Sync

[FB]

Hi,

On Thu, Jan 25, 2007 at 05:17:48PM +1100, Katie Hardman wrote:
> Hey everyone,
> 
> Just curious to know, If say, i was to sync Documents and Settings with
> AFS, when a computer connects will it display ALL users documents and
> settings in my computer, or will it only download the information as
> required. If someone could clarify this for me it'd be great!

I guess, you're talking about using Windows as AFS-Client.

You don't really "connect" to AFS like you do with Windows-Shares. AFS is a
distributed filesystem. The AFS-Windows-client shows the root of this
filesystem as a named drive (e.g. 'F:'). Looking at 'F:\' will show some
directories, representing different AFS-cells (~ AFS-"Domains") which might
be distributed all over the world. Changing to one of the cell-directories
is enough to tell you computer to connect to servers of that cell and show
what's there.

Your AFS-client will just get the data, you are trying to access. Listing
an AFS-directory will not fetch e.g. the content of files or the content of
it's subdirectories. However, there are exceptions like the explorer trying to
read a file's icon or some filemanager scanning the whole filesystem tree - but
that's not AFS's fault.

The whole (global) AFS namespace looks like a gigantic directory tree - no
need to explicitly connect to any afs-server. How the tree is structured is
up to the administrators of each cell.

HTH

Ragards,

Frank