AFS at NJIT: Introduction and Overview

0: Table of Contents

1: What is this?

This document describes "AFS" and how it is used in the context of the NJIT community.

2: Uses of AFS at NJIT

• Distributed space: All faculty, staff, and students area allocated space ranging from 125GB to hundreds of GBs. Has 24/7/365 availability, backed up every day.
• Web pages: Web pages as well as web applications are served off AFS.
• UNIX labs deployment: All Solaris and Linux labs are centrally managed using AFS. All Windows labs are configured with AFS access for users.
• High Performance Computing (HPC) Initiative: NJIT and University of Medicine and Dentistry of NJ (UMDNJ) and others are utilizing AFS across the state to share HPC resources for medical and other computationally-intensive research.

NJIT also makes some use of Microsoft distributed file system. NJIT no longer uses NFS for enterprise distributed filesystem purposes.

3: Technology Overview

• Open source: Developed by Carnegie Mellon University, later commercially developed by Transarc, acquired by IBM, released in 2000 under "IBM Public License," becoming "OpenAFS".
• Multiple OS support: Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, AIX, BSD, MS Windows, and several others.
• Kerberos authentication: Open standard, developed by MIT, very secure, support for and by OSes listed above.
• Enterprise scalable: Locally caching, transparent replication, supporting tens of thousands simultaneous clients to tens of terabytes of data
• Global name space: Different organization's file systems are nodes in one world-wide file system, eg, a data file is specified as /afs/our.school.edu/your/example.txt if accessed from NJIT, MIT, CERN, etc. Under MS Windows backslash (\) is used instead of slash (/) to show paths.
• Access Control Lists: Allows limits of access by persons, groups, addresses. File owners can make up own groups or set individual access.
• Inter-organization and international utilization: The above features result in AFS being "the" solution when data must be shared between organizations, or in an organization with many separated facilities, or on multiple platforms, or when files must be available when servers or networks are broken.

4: AFS Deployments

The actual number of world-wide AFS deployments is not known. The main public directory of servers only has 176 listed, but this does not include deployments such as NJIT that do not wish to be public. It does include some very prominent organizations, mostly involved in research. Nearly all commercial deployments are not public, but some can be inferred from attendance of AFS workshops (most famously, Morgan Stanley). Here are some of the major names gleaned from both the directory and the workshops attendees lists:

• US Universities: MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, Cornell, CMU, Caltech, Dartmouth, Harvard, ISU, Notre Dame, PSC, UP, RPI, Stanford, UMich, UNC, UWM, Wisc
• Major Labs & Gov agencies: CERN, JPL, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, Fermi National Acclerator Laboratory, Naval Research Lab - CCS, Naval Research Lab - Lab for Computational Physics, US Geological Survey, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory
• Foreign Universities: University of Paderborn (Germany), University of Hohenheim (Germany), Albert-Ludwigs-Universitat Freiburg (Switzerland), Swiss Federal Inst. of Tech., Instituto de Fisica de Cantabria ( Spain), Instituto de Fisica Corpuscular (Spain), University of Helsinki Institute of Biotechnology, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden), University Roma Tre (Italy), Stockholm University
• Commercial: GPP Chemnitz mbH (Germany), DESY Zeuthen (Germany), Morgan Stanley, Ford Motor Company, Vodacomm

5: Sources for this and more info

• The official OpenAFS website: http://openafs.org/
• Kerberos FAQ: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/kerberos-faq/general
• Wikipedia description of Andrew File System: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_file_system
• Wikipedia description of OpenAFS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAFS
• MetaGlossary description of AFS http://metaglossary.com/meanings/582353/
• Official list of published AFS deployments (not necessarly publicly accessable): http://dl.central.org/dl/cellservdb/CellServDB
• User guide for AFS at Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics: http://www.nordita.org/computing/?invoke=46-AFS//10-user_guide.php&invoketext=user%C2%A0guide
• Lists of participants in AFS & Kerberos Best Practices Workshops (i.e., who uses it most): http://www-conf.slac.stanford.edu/AFSBestPractices/register/default.asp, http://www.pmw.org/afsbpw05/attendees.html, http://www.pmw.org/afsbpw06/attendees.html,
• Current AFS & Kerberos Best Practices Workshop info: http://grand.central.org/workshop
• AFS limits in future releases: http://www.openafs.org/pipermail/openafs-devel/2007-January/014735.html

6: How to get help or more info

Fix password problems at http://afspassword.njit.edu.

Please make sure the problem you are encountering is not already described in the troubleshooting section above.

Your primary contact, especially if you have problems installing, is the NJIT Helpdesk.

If you encounter problems after installing, you can contact the helpdesk or email sys_help@oak.njit.edu.

Please report problems with this document to sys@oak.njit.edu.