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Using OpenAFS effectively

Using the OpenAFS filesystem effectively

The infrastructure provided by Research Computing at Dartmouth College includes a central file storage system using OpenAFS.

For many users, the differences between files stored in OpenAFS and local files are not important. However, there are some differences in behaviour, and features not found in traditional desktop or Unix filesystems. These notes are intended to explain the important differences from a user perspective, and allow you to use the systems more safely, effectively and efficiently. Throughout these notes, OpenAFS and AFS are used interchangeably.

Target Audience

All users of Research Computing central systems, Dartmouth RStor data volumes, Discovery, PBS AFS systems, and anyone wishing to use AFS from a private computer. Unless noted, these notes apply to any AFS installation. Where specific examples are given, they apply to the Dartmouth Research Computing (northstar.dartmouth.edu) cell.

Topics Include

An overview of AFS
AFS clients, comparison to other network file systems
Using AFS utility programs
File I/O semantics; local file caching; performance issues
AFS volumes and quotas
The AFS filesystem layout
Kerberos authentication and token lifetimes; background jobs
Access Control (Permissions)
Using groups for access control
Backup snapshots
Replicated volumes (RStor data volumes)
Installing AFS clients

Assumptions

It is assumed that you already know how to:

log in and get a command line window (any shell - command line tools operate similarly on Unix/Linux, Mac OSX and Windows)
run basic commands, make directories, navigate directories

Example commands are shown like this. Many commands are shown with links to their online documentation (fs)
Output from commands is shown like this
Optional items are shown in brackets, [ like this ]

Some descriptions in these notes have more detail available, and are denoted like this:

These notes are updated from time to time. The "development" set of notes are http://northstar-www.dartmouth.edu/~richard/classes/afs (Dartmouth only)

Richard Brittain, Dartmouth College Computing Services.
© 2010 Dartmouth College.
Comments and questions, contact Richard.Brittain @ dartmouth.edu

welcome.src last modified Aug 3, 2010

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