Distributed Services with OpenAFS: for Enterprise and Education

Franco Milicchio · Wolfgang Alexander Gehrke

Jun 2007 · Springer Science & Business Media

About this ebook

This book provides a concise answer to how one should organize a robust enterprise IT infrastructure based on open-source software with mainstream hardware. It is a necessity for large organizations to build a central user - thentication service, global user information storage, and to o?er common access to personal ?les regardless of the location the user wishes to connect from. All these issues have been addressed with the help of well-established technologies such as the industry standard Kerberos for user authentication and the OpenAFS distributed ?le system, originally conceived at CMU and used at universities like MIT and Stanford and also at research institutions like CERN among many others. Our presentation o?ers support for system architects and administrators, to decide and implement an enterprise IT infrastructure, and for advanced UNIX users wishing to look beyond isolated workstations, to experience the move from local to global administration and the resulting challenges. The presentation is a step-by-step guide, accompanied with a detailed explanation ofthecorrespondingtechnicalcontextthatmirrorsourownexperiencegained during the setup of an AFS cell at our computer science and engineering department. The main focus lies on the application of UNIX-based services, with particular attention to the underlying OpenAFS ?le system: therefore it can be seen as a companion to the excellent and currently only available book“ManagingAFS:TheAndrewFileSystem”byRichardCampbell,which re?ects the new state of today’s implementation.

About the author

Franco Milicchio is currently at the Department of
Computer Science and Automation at the University Roma Tre, Italy. He
graduated in computer engineering at the same university.

Wolfgang A. Gehrke has worked the last five years as a system
administrator at the Department of Computer Science and Automation
at the University Roma Tre, Italy. He holds a PhD in theoretical
computer science from the University Linz, Austria.