Entry tags:

debian afs

AFS rides again

After using AFS for a number of years, I gave up on it several years ago in frustration, because it was complex and difficult to install with the Linux kernel of the time. However, in the meantime, OpenAFS has become dominant, and it works well with Linux and Debian. Installation is easy thanks to module-assistant:

 aptitude install module-assistant build-essential
 aptitude install krb5-user krb5-clients
 aptitude install openafs-client openafs-modules-source openafs-krb5
 m-a prepare
 m-a a-i openafs
 invoke-rc.d openafs-client start

The whole world is now under /afs. To authenticate to the default cell,

 kinit
 aklog

Having access to several AFS servers, I'm still trying to figure out how to get simultaneous access to all of them. It seems that you can only kinit to one realm at a time. However, it need not be your default realm;

kinit user@OTHER.REALM
aklog -cell other.afs.server -k OTHER.REALM

works.

AFS wants cache space, which it insists be ext2 or ext3. If you don't have those (I have xfs), don't worry, you can make one in a file on any filesystem:

  dd if=/dev/zero of=/some/local/dir count=nnnn bs=1M 
  mkfs.ext3 /some/local/dir
  mount /some/local/dir /var/cache/openafs -o loop

When you configure the client, give a size 95% of nnnn, it won't allow any larger. Also when configuring the client, say yes to "Dynamically generate the contents of /afs?" (AFS_DYNROOT). This will free you from your home cell's listing of sites, and use /etc/openafs-client/CellServDB, but it will effectively dynamically mount them: it won't actually contact the server until you refer to a site.