You and your colleagues are invited to the 5th annual
AFS & Kerberos Best Practices Workshop
to be held here at NJIT on
May 19th-23rd, 2008

This Best Practices Workshop (BPW) is a gathering of AFS & Kerberos users and administrators, novices and experts and everyone in between.  This is of interest to:
Please see http://grand.central.org/workshop for full details.
Register before April 21st for early registration discount.
Call for presenters/papers.
Info about AFS at NJIT.

Conference Overview

The conference features two separate one-day tutorials, and a three-day workshop.

AFS is a distributed networked filesystem specialized for security and scalability, and supports read-only replication of volumes and local caching of files to provide access across unstable networks or server crashes. Different organizations can easily access each others' files because AFS uses global filespace and a common link point in all deployments, so a file has the same name on any computer or operating system using it. Control of who can access what from where can be set with a very high level of granularity, via access control lists (ACLs). There are actually three slight variants of AFS, all of which are discussed at the the BPW; the most common variant is OpenAFS.

The first tutorial is an introduction to AFS and AFS best practices, intended for IT professionals who use or intend to use AFS. Attendees learn the theory of how AFS works, how to establish a cell, and then discussion of strategies, techniques, and tools intended for reliable, secure, and simplified administration of AFS.

The second tutorial is an introduction to Kerberos authentication, with emphasis on its use in AFS. Kerberos is the de-facto standard computer network authentication protocol, deployed by Microsoft, Sun, Apple, and others.

The three-day workshop features status reports from various AFS/Kerberos developers, and a series of papers presented by experts in specific topics of AFS development, deployment, administration, and use. Q/A sessions typically follow the presentations, as well as much discussion during breaks. The workshop also traditionally features a banquet, sponsored by industry vendors. Attendees benefit primarily from learning how other users are using AFS, in what the direction OpenAFS is going, and of the commercial users and commercial products that support AFS.

This is the fifth BPW. In the past, about a third of the attendees are international, mostly from western Europe; for this conference the organizers are expecting perhaps 50% international. Approximately half of all attendees are from educational institutions, the balance being government agencies and corporations, and very few students or private individuals.