This book describes, in detail, the benefits of using the AFS distributed file system in large and small organizations. By relieving administrators of inefficiencies of scale and allowing users to retrive files effectively from anywhere in their organization. This book demonstrates the power of using an integrated, fully functional, and centrally managed system to provide a ubiquitous and reliable data storage system. This book explains how to manage AFS to its greatest effect incuding the installation of an adequate server setup to handle thousand of clients with a minimum of administrator and hardware overhead.
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Designed to handle terabytes of data and thousands of users distributed across large networks, the Andrew File System (AFS) works as a Unix and Windows NT add-on that replaces the standard Network File System (NFS). The basic idea of AFS is that all users of a network get a common picture of the file system even though it represents data that's stored on many different machines. Originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University and now commercially promoted by Transarc Corporation, AFS has a solid presence in very large commercial networks. Its popularity seems likely to trickle down to midsize organizations as businesses of all kinds become more network-intensive.
Campbell's book takes the ponderous set of AFS documentation and distills it into a collection of task- and question-oriented segments. The book opens with an analysis of AFS architecture that will prove useful to those thinking about deploying AFS. Managing AFS then covers hardware requirements, volume structure decisions, and client administration in depth. Following a discussion of AFS's implementation of Kerberos security, Campbell gets into task-oriented discussions, covering groups, rights, archive procedures, and disaster recovery. One interesting chapter presents AFS case studies, highlighting how IBM, Morgan Stanley, and the University of Michigan are using the file system. An appendix details the various AFS command suites in a sort of abbreviated man-page format.
Throughout Managing AFS, the text is clear and readable--even entertaining. If you're wondering how AFS might work on your network or you want to know the easiest way to set up a user account, this book meets your needs.
From the Inside Flap
Preface
Introduction
This book describes the implementation, administration, and use of Transarc Corporation's AFS(r), the Andrew File System. This distributed system has several attributes which make it ideally suited for use in organizations trying to manage the constantly growing amount of file data needed and produced by today's operating systems and applications.
Even though most of the academic emphasis on AFS concerns its performance and semantics, much of the benefit of the system derives from its integrated approach to administration. The ability of AFS to support many more clients per server, to decrease network loads, to provide location-transparent access to data, and to automatically fail over to replica sites is reason enough to investigate the system. But the collection of tools supplied to administrators which provides behind-the-scenes control of the distributed system is equally important.
Over the last decade, AFS's use has steadily increased so that by now many hundreds of sites around the world are full-fledged members of an on-line, global, distributed file system. These sites tend to be quite large because AFS is particularly optimized to support the file storage needs of thousands of users. Yet given the ever-increasing sales of computers and their voracious disk appetites, mature solutions to medium- and large-scale computing sites will be needed by more and more people.
Audience and Scope
When you purchase AFS, you'll receive several manuals that come with the package. This book is not a replacement for serious reading of that official documentation. There are a multitude of options for almost all processes and utilities in the AFS command suite. Rather than catalog each argument, I hope to provide the reasons behind some of the design decisions which otherwise may appear arbitrary or counterintuitive. How and why the AFS clients and servers work as they do is the scope of this book. The following chapters describe the newer features of the system and highlight the latest advances with some explanations of their purpose; they do not describe the precise syntax or option to every possible command. For that, you can use the manual set supplied by Transarc, the developer of the commercial AFS product. The examples and suggestions for managing AFS are shown using the standard UNIX(r) command-line interface; the AFS server programs are available only for UNIX servers, so knowledge of basic UNIX commands and operations is a prerequisite for using the system.
If you've used NFS(r) or NetWare(tm) before and have managed desktops, file servers, and disks, you may be wondering what all the fuss is about; after all, these services have been around for years. But AFS is designed quite differently from these other file systems for reasons that make sense but take some explaining.
There's no simple linear way to discuss the mechanisms to manage and use AFS because most parts of the system are dependent on each other. I will try to create some order out of this interdependence at the risk of using some terms that are not fully described until later. For example, access control lists-used to detail who can access which files-are mentioned early on but are not defined until the middle of the book. The definition isn't required in the early stages, as long as you can trust that eventually the specifics will be explained.
Structurally, we'll begin with a broad overview and gradually introduce more and more detail, moving from the central servers to the distributed client desktops.
Contents
The first two chapters describe AFS in general terms.
Chapter 1 provides a general overview of the benefits of AFS, why it was developed in the first place, its particular design and drawbacks, and information about Transarc. Administrators, managers, and users will gain an understanding of the system from Chapter 1.
Chapter 2 introduces much of the technical vocabulary of AFS and describes its client/server architecture, including the caching protocol and file server organization. Here, the architecture described in Chapter 1 is put into concrete terms of the protocol used by clients and servers.
The next four chapters are devoted to the administrative specifics required to install and run an AFS cell. Chapter 3 discusses basic server management by itemizing the processes, operations, and systems that make the servers work, with special emphasis on the internal distributed database protocol. These issues are of concern when setting up an AFS cell.
Chapter 4 discusses AFS volume management issues, the very heart of AFS administration. While AFS is primarily thought of as a protocol by which client workstations access file data, the system's real value is in its support for large-scale administration. This chapter describes how AFS volumes are administered to create the global file namespace, to provide access to replicated data, and to provide users with on-line access to a backup version of their files.
Chapter 5 describes client configurations and includes suggestions for optimizing desktop access to AFS. The chapter also introduces the package client administration tool as well as two products that allow PCs to access AFS-Transarc's port to Windows NT(tm) and Platinum Technology's PC-Enterprise(tm).
Chapter 6 describes the user authentication process, management of the Kerberos database, and the use of standard MIT Kerberos, versions 4 and 5.
Chapter 7 details the user and developer view of AFS, including logging in to AFS, access controls, group management, and the slight differences in file system semantics. There's also a brief description of how PC users manage their AFS files with Transarc's NT port. Users not interested in administration and management can refer to this chapter for examples of how to use AFS.
Chapter 8 focuses on Transarc's built-in archiving system, ad hoc volume dump tools, and mechanisms to save other critical configuration data. It also includes information on integrating AFS with commercial backup systems.
Chapter 9 returns to the subject of overall administration, with more information on AFS server administrative responsibilities, insights into the Kerberos authentication system, providing access for NFS clients, issues regarding the installation of third-party software, and comments on a few of the public and commercial AFS administrative tools now available.
Chapter 10 continues the subject of management with a discussion of AFS's debugging and monitoring tools. The chapter focuses in depth on advanced issues of administering UNIX-based AFS servers.
Chapter 11 describes large-site administration and presents four case studies of successful use of AFS by global or otherwise interesting sites.
Chapter 12 concludes the book with some thoughts on how to evaluate and begin using AFS at your organization, and what alternative file systems are up to. Managers and administrators will gain a greater appreciation for the potential scope of an AFS implementation project.
Appendix A is a command-by-command description of the major AFS tools including all subcommands. As you read through the book, you can refer to this appendix for a reminder of the purpose of any commands. This listing also includes information on the precise authentication required to run each command.
Typographic Conventions
System operations are shown as command-line input and output, such as:
$ fs mkm alice user.alice
$ fs lsmount alice
'alice' is a mount point for '#user.alice'
For people unfamiliar with UNIX, $ is the standard UNIX Bourne shell prompt. Following UNIX convention, when you have logged in as the superuser or root, the shell prompt is #. These command sequences were executed on a Sun(r) workstation running the Solaris(tm) operating system with AFS version 3.4a and pasted into the text of this book. Output from AFS commands on other systems should be identical apart from dates and other ephemeral data; output from standard UNIX commands may differ more or less depending on your particular desktop operating system. Liberal use is made of standard programs such as date, touch and shell output redirection to demonstrate file creation. The cat program is often used to demonstrate that the files in question were created successfully.
The hypothetical organization used as an example throughout the examples, HQ, and its domain name, hq.firm, were non-existent at the time this book was written.
Acknowledgments
In writing this book I am indebted to the software engineers who put AFS together, first (and still) at Carnegie Mellon University and later at Transarc Corporation; to the computing community which has freely shared experiences and workarounds; to the University of Michigan's Center for Information Technology Integration, where some of my best friends work and play; and to the Union Bank of Switzerland for their support. Many people in these groups helped review this book; over the years, I've learned much abo
Introduction
This book describes the implementation, administration, and use of Transarc Corporation's AFS(r), the Andrew File System. This distributed system has several attributes which make it ideally suited for use in organizations trying to manage the constantly growing amount of file data needed and produced by today's operating systems and applications.
Even though most of the academic emphasis on AFS concerns its performance and semantics, much of the benefit of the system derives from its integrated approach to administration. The ability of AFS to support many more clients per server, to decrease network loads, to provide location-transparent access to data, and to automatically fail over to replica sites is reason enough to investigate the system. But the collection of tools supplied to administrators which provides behind-the-scenes control of the distributed system is equally important.
Over the last decade, AFS's use has steadily increased so that by now many hundreds of sites around the world are full-fledged members of an on-line, global, distributed file system. These sites tend to be quite large because AFS is particularly optimized to support the file storage needs of thousands of users. Yet given the ever-increasing sales of computers and their voracious disk appetites, mature solutions to medium- and large-scale computing sites will be needed by more and more people.
Audience and Scope
When you purchase AFS, you'll receive several manuals that come with the package. This book is not a replacement for serious reading of that official documentation. There are a multitude of options for almost all processes and utilities in the AFS command suite. Rather than catalog each argument, I hope to provide the reasons behind some of the design decisions which otherwise may appear arbitrary or counterintuitive. How and why the AFS clients and servers work as they do is the scope of this book. The following chapters describe the newer features of the system and highlight the latest advances with some explanations of their purpose; they do not describe the precise syntax or option to every possible command. For that, you can use the manual set supplied by Transarc, the developer of the commercial AFS product. The examples and suggestions for managing AFS are shown using the standard UNIX(r) command-line interface; the AFS server programs are available only for UNIX servers, so knowledge of basic UNIX commands and operations is a prerequisite for using the system.
If you've used NFS(r) or NetWare(tm) before and have managed desktops, file servers, and disks, you may be wondering what all the fuss is about; after all, these services have been around for years. But AFS is designed quite differently from these other file systems for reasons that make sense but take some explaining.
There's no simple linear way to discuss the mechanisms to manage and use AFS because most parts of the system are dependent on each other. I will try to create some order out of this interdependence at the risk of using some terms that are not fully described until later. For example, access control lists-used to detail who can access which files-are mentioned early on but are not defined until the middle of the book. The definition isn't required in the early stages, as long as you can trust that eventually the specifics will be explained.
Structurally, we'll begin with a broad overview and gradually introduce more and more detail, moving from the central servers to the distributed client desktops.
Contents
The first two chapters describe AFS in general terms.
Chapter 1 provides a general overview of the benefits of AFS, why it was developed in the first place, its particular design and drawbacks, and information about Transarc. Administrators, managers, and users will gain an understanding of the system from Chapter 1.
Chapter 2 introduces much of the technical vocabulary of AFS and describes its client/server architecture, including the caching protocol and file server organization. Here, the architecture described in Chapter 1 is put into concrete terms of the protocol used by clients and servers.
The next four chapters are devoted to the administrative specifics required to install and run an AFS cell. Chapter 3 discusses basic server management by itemizing the processes, operations, and systems that make the servers work, with special emphasis on the internal distributed database protocol. These issues are of concern when setting up an AFS cell.
Chapter 4 discusses AFS volume management issues, the very heart of AFS administration. While AFS is primarily thought of as a protocol by which client workstations access file data, the system's real value is in its support for large-scale administration. This chapter describes how AFS volumes are administered to create the global file namespace, to provide access to replicated data, and to provide users with on-line access to a backup version of their files.
Chapter 5 describes client configurations and includes suggestions for optimizing desktop access to AFS. The chapter also introduces the package client administration tool as well as two products that allow PCs to access AFS-Transarc's port to Windows NT(tm) and Platinum Technology's PC-Enterprise(tm).
Chapter 6 describes the user authentication process, management of the Kerberos database, and the use of standard MIT Kerberos, versions 4 and 5.
Chapter 7 details the user and developer view of AFS, including logging in to AFS, access controls, group management, and the slight differences in file system semantics. There's also a brief description of how PC users manage their AFS files with Transarc's NT port. Users not interested in administration and management can refer to this chapter for examples of how to use AFS.
Chapter 8 focuses on Transarc's built-in archiving system, ad hoc volume dump tools, and mechanisms to save other critical configuration data. It also includes information on integrating AFS with commercial backup systems.
Chapter 9 returns to the subject of overall administration, with more information on AFS server administrative responsibilities, insights into the Kerberos authentication system, providing access for NFS clients, issues regarding the installation of third-party software, and comments on a few of the public and commercial AFS administrative tools now available.
Chapter 10 continues the subject of management with a discussion of AFS's debugging and monitoring tools. The chapter focuses in depth on advanced issues of administering UNIX-based AFS servers.
Chapter 11 describes large-site administration and presents four case studies of successful use of AFS by global or otherwise interesting sites.
Chapter 12 concludes the book with some thoughts on how to evaluate and begin using AFS at your organization, and what alternative file systems are up to. Managers and administrators will gain a greater appreciation for the potential scope of an AFS implementation project.
Appendix A is a command-by-command description of the major AFS tools including all subcommands. As you read through the book, you can refer to this appendix for a reminder of the purpose of any commands. This listing also includes information on the precise authentication required to run each command.
Typographic Conventions
System operations are shown as command-line input and output, such as:
$ fs mkm alice user.alice
$ fs lsmount alice
'alice' is a mount point for '#user.alice'
For people unfamiliar with UNIX, $ is the standard UNIX Bourne shell prompt. Following UNIX convention, when you have logged in as the superuser or root, the shell prompt is #. These command sequences were executed on a Sun(r) workstation running the Solaris(tm) operating system with AFS version 3.4a and pasted into the text of this book. Output from AFS commands on other systems should be identical apart from dates and other ephemeral data; output from standard UNIX commands may differ more or less depending on your particular desktop operating system. Liberal use is made of standard programs such as date, touch and shell output redirection to demonstrate file creation. The cat program is often used to demonstrate that the files in question were created successfully.
The hypothetical organization used as an example throughout the examples, HQ, and its domain name, hq.firm, were non-existent at the time this book was written.
Acknowledgments
In writing this book I am indebted to the software engineers who put AFS together, first (and still) at Carnegie Mellon University and later at Transarc Corporation; to the computing community which has freely shared experiences and workarounds; to the University of Michigan's Center for Information Technology Integration, where some of my best friends work and play; and to the Union Bank of Switzerland for their support. Many people in these groups helped review this book; over the years, I've learned much abo
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very thorough, excellent style,
By A Customer
This review is from: Managing AFS: The Andrew File System (Paperback)
If you are an afs sysadmin you can't afford not to have this incredible book. I'm surprised there are no other rave reviews here.Richard Campbell has done a tremendous job showing the reader what is going on under the hood of an afs system. He also mentions various little titbits you won't find anywhere in Transarc's documentation or webstite. The chapter on debuggin various problems will give you an procedural methodology on how to tackle certain problems. There is an enormous amount of info in this book. It's also worth mentioning that the publisher has done a wonderfull job on design and typesetting; very clean like one would expect from a serious technical book. Anyway what r u waiting for ?; click and buy, this is your new best friend ;)
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent book on managing AFS,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Managing AFS: The Andrew File System (Paperback)
Caveat: yes, I knew the author. I don't think that has affected my review, but full disclosure is usually a good thing.
There is a startling shortage of books on AFS (the Andrew File System), and this book is probably the reason why. Ric Campbell wrote this book in the early days of AFS, and it has been enough of a supplement to the system documentation that there's been little need for another. Campbell's presentation assumes you have some degree of skill as a UNIX or Linux system administrator. Given that, the book is enough that any competent admin should be able to build and maintain their AFS cell. Do be aware that the book is dated. AFS languished for a while, but development has picked up and there are a number of improvements (particularly on the client side) which are useful to know about. This is the only reason I give it four stars rather than five. Let us hope Ric returns to the book and gives it the update is deserves. I happily recommend both the book and the file system.
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