Tutorial: Introduction to AFS and its Best Practices - Tuesday March 23, 2004

This tutorial will be given by Alf Wachsmann. Tutorial and Workshop take place in Building 48 (ROB) at SLAC.
It will not be hands-on.

The content is very much work in progress. Please send suggestions for other topics to afsbest-workshop@slac.stanford.edu

Tentative Content

• General Introduction to AFS (9:00 - 10:00)
  • Short history of AFS
  • What is AFS
  • Strengths and weaknesses of AFS: Where you should and should not use AFS
  • AFS lingo (cell, partition, volume, cache, principal, token, ACL, etc.)
• AFS Client Topics (10:00 - 10:30, 11:00 - 11:30)
  • Client installation
  • Client configuration
  • File systems for AFS cache
  • Getting started without your own AFS servers
• AFS Server Topics (11:30 - 12:30, 13:30 - 15:00)
  • Planning a new cell
  • AFS file space layout
  • Server capacity planning
  • Volume replication
  • Limiting access via IP address range
  • Naming schemas and conventions
  • Server filesystems
  • namei vs. inode fileserver
  • Kerberos 5 KDC instead of kaserver
  • DB Server installation
  • Fileserver installation
  • Volume maintenance (moving, quota, etc.)
  • Fileserver maintenance (partitions, load balancing, etc.)
  • Backup
• Advanced AFS Topics (15:30 - 17:00)
  • Cross-realm authentication
  • Interoperability with different operating systems (Unices, Windows, MacOS)
  • Translators: NFS, Samba
  • Tools and Techniques for Administering a Large AFS Cell:
    • Cron jobs
    • Delegation of administration