[OpenAFS] Big Initial Question about OpenAFS

[Derrick J Brashear]

On Wed, 14 Mar 2007, Robinson, Eric wrote:

> Network connectivity differs significantly between NFS and Samba. With
> CIFS/Samba, shares may participate in a DFS tree and appear to the
> client as a single unified tree. However, when the client actually
> connects to a resource, he is redirected to the IP address of the server
> that holds the resource, so he ends up communicating with multiple
> hosts. With NFS, a server mounts the remote filesystem(s) and the client
> communicates only with one machine.
>
> Which is OpenAFS more like? I am hoping it  is more like NFS because I

Well, not really either. There would be a small bounded set of AFS servers 
but typically more than one.

> have to work around firewall limitations. I am hoping that I can
> communicate solely with the OpenAFS server, and it will in turn
> communicate with other servers that it has mounted. Is that the way it
> works?

AFS servers don't mount other things and re-export.  They export their own 
space.