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

[Gedaliah Wolosh]

On Sun, the 23rd of Sh'vat, 5764 (02/15/2004) Ragnar Sundblad wrote:

>
> --On den 15 februari 2004 13:21 -0500 Gedaliah Wolosh <gwolosh@njit.edu>
> wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> Another PB working good, interresting.
>
> Typically all kinds of applications hangs or at least gets
> inresponsive when your tokens expire - are you sure this is
> not the problem you see?

Could be.  Also changing networks have caused this 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.
>
> I agree. I am very happy that there are (at least have been)
> people working on AFS within apple. (Remember that this is
> more than you can say about most of the other companies you
> mentioned...)

The situation is different now. Previously AFS as a commercial venture
needed to integrate with the operating systems entrenched in academia.
Now that AFS is entrenched in academia, Apple must see to it that they
can integrate with AFS. In my opinion, the onus is on Apple.

>
> > 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.
>
> I think it can use PAM, can't it? I don't know why you would,
> though, I have never seen PAM solve any problem that I couldn't
> solve better and cleaner and with less trouble with other means.
> PAM is also just an login-time user authentication mechanism
> that integrates poorly with many combinations of programs and
> back ends, it doesn't solve all the other problems that for
> example krb solves.
>
> Why wouldn't you want Krb5? If you use AFS you (currently) need
> kerberos 4 on some form, and you don't want krb4 since it is
> insecure and old, you want krb5 with afs compatibility ("2b").
>

I could be wrong but I don't think the login window uses pam. I agree
that krb5 is the way to go and that direction is being actively pursued,
however, transitions like this take time.  Being able to use the login
window now would be a great convenience.

> > 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.
>
> We have home directories for all our 12K users in AFS. We have
> some links for some app caches up in /tmp that we establish
> at login time. Most things work really good.
> Portable use is another issue, but that is an AFS "problem",
> not an Mac OS X problem.
>

Good to know...

>
> Yep! How much we all would love to see Apple do that, I am
> afraid that we can't count on it. I think we need someone
> who understands this code to take a look, and for now I think
> it must be someone outside apple.
>
> It is probably something trivial, we just need the right
> person to take a look.

If it is trivial, then even more so Apple should look at it.  And after
they solve it publicize it.  It looks good for them and is helpful to
us.

>
> /ragge

--Gedaliah