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Re: Best network filesystem for a bleeding edge, pure linux environment?



On 2011-03-17 14:53:37 Celejar wrote:
>> Already using Kerberos everywhere?  If not, don't bother with AFS.  I'm
>> not sure about Coda, but I think it is the same situation.
>
>Would you mind elaborating a bit?  Are you talking about security,
>authentication, encryption?

Kerberos is primarily authentication.  It provides some information to 
authorization systems built on top of it and has some small authorization 
conventions for managing the domain.  It uses encryption to enable the 
authentication, but doesn't necessarily enforce any protocol-level encryption 
on applications using it for authentication.

From what I understand, permissions on files under AFS are not really handled 
the way a "simple" UNIX filesystem is (uid/gid/perms in the inode, optional 
acl extensions).  Instead, files are owned and permissions granted based on 
your Kerberos principal for the domain the AFS is in.  Essentially, a Kerberos 
infrastructure is necessary to use AFS, at least a minimal one.  And, with a 
truly minimal Kerberos configuration, I don't think it would be any more 
secure and probably more poorly performing than an equivalent NFS.
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