[OpenAFS-port-darwin] Re: Many crashes on OS X 10.3 - MP problem?

[Gedaliah Wolosh]

I have been running an openafs client on my G4 powerbook since Mac OS
10.1 without a kernel panic.  I have had the finder hang and other
minor annoyances but stability has generally not been a problem.

As an aside, it would seem to me that if Apple wants to make serious
headway into academic institutions, then full integration with AFS is
absolutely needed.

There are several areas where this falls short -

1) The login window does not integrate with AFS.  You need Krb5 and the
login.logout hook supplied by Kosut. Integrating the login window with
pam would be a great improvement.

2) As Joe Jackson has mentioned much earlier on in this list, there are
reasons to give users local home directories, with links into the afs
home directory for ~/Library, etc...  This is inconvenient and not
necessary in any other Unix client.

3) Although not necessarily an Apple problem, some software will not
install correctly in AFS, Adobe Photoshop for example.  In our university
we prefer to install all of our software in AFS volumes and make it
available to all of the clients.  Photoshop will not even let a user
save files to, or retrive files from an AFS directory.

4) As reported in this list there are significant instabilities using
Panther.  OpenAFS.org does not have a latest release package for Jaguar.
This instability will need to be addressed.

Here at NJIT we have hundreds of Solaris, SGI, linux and Windows AFS
clients.  We have one lab with 10 G4s. Since I am responsible for managing
Mac OS X in the university, it is unlikely that I will recommend any
more until these issues are addressed.

_________________________________________________________________
Gedaliah Wolosh, Ph.D.
Manager Computing Resources - CCS
New Jersey Institute of Technology	 Office 973 596-5437
323 King Blvd 	GITC 2203		 Fax    973 642-4761
Newark, NJ 07102                         Email  gwolosh@njit.edu