IT Services - Mac OS X How To: OpenAFS

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How to Install and Configure OpenAFS
For help or if you have questions or problems, please contact the Solution Center, 195 Durham Center, solution@iastate.edu or call IT Services at 294-4000.

Table of Contents

About attach
System Requirements
Downloading OpenAFS
Installing and Configuring OpenAFS
Accessing Your AFS Files

About OpenAFS

AFS is a distributed filesystem product, pioneered at Carnegie Mellon University and supported and developed as a product by Transarc Corporation (now IBM Pittsburgh Labs). It offers a client-server architecture for file sharing, providing location independence, scalability and transparent migration capabilities for data.
IBM branched the source of the AFS product, and made a copy of the source available for community development and maintenance. They called the release OpenAFS.

System Requirements

Kerberos must enabled and configured.
See How to Configure Kerberos.

Downloading OpenAFS

IT Services has put together an OpenAFS installer that will install both the OpenAFS package and the necessary configuration files for using OpenAFS at Iowa State.
Download the appropriate version of OpenAFS for your version of Mac OS X:

Software Download Mac OS X

OpenAFS 1.4.7 for Mac OS X 10.5 (Universal) 17.6 MB 10.5

OpenAFS 1.4.7 for Mac OS X 10.4 (Universal) 17.7 MB 10.4

OpenAFS 1.4.1 for Mac OS X 10.3 (PowerPC) 9 MB 10.3

Installing and Configuring OpenAFS

If the downloaded file wasn't automatically uncompressed and untar'd, then drop the file onto StuffIt Expander. Then double-click on the appropriate .mpkg file for the version of OpenAFS you are installing.

Mac OS X 10.3: Accessing Your AFS Files

You do not need to do the following steps for Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.5.
If you are having trouble getting full read-write access to your files on AFS, you may want to set your local uid to match that of your uid that is used on the AFS file system. To ease this process, we strongly recommend you have an Administrator account that is not the same as the one you are using to access the AFS file system.

Login with an Administrator account that is not the one you are changing the uid on.

Enter the following command in Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/) to find the uid number:
pts examine net-id
where net-id is your Iowa State Net-Id (or the Net-Id of the AFS user you are chaning the uid of). Write down the "id:" number from the output of this command. This is your new-uid.

Run "NetInfo Manager" (/Applications/Utilities/)

In the left column, select /

In the middle column, select users

In the right column, select your net-id

Authenticate by clicking the lock icon (on the bottom left-hand corner of the window) that is next to the text that says "Click the lock to make changes".

Under the "Property" list, find the line that contains "uid". Write down the "Value" number. This is your old-uid.

Double-click the uid value and change it to the new-uid value.

Save your changes (Domain -> Save Changes) and quit NetInfo Manager.

Enter the following command in Terminal (/Applications/Utilities) to set the appropriate file ownership permissions:
sudo find / -xdev -user old-uid -print -exec chown new-uid {} \;
replacing old-uid and new-uid in this command with the values that you wrote down.

If you have any other drives connected to your machine, enter the above command to correct file ownership permissions there too. But, in place of / in the command use /Volumes/volume-name, where volume-name is the name of the drive. For example, for the "Stuff" drive, you would use /Volumes/Stuff.

Logout from the Administrator account.