"Managing AFS"

February 2020

A little over 20 years ago, I wrote the book "Managing AFS: The Andrew File System" for Prentice-Hall Publishing. Late last year, a random article on Reddit mentioned that authors could ask their publisher for a "Reversion of Rights" to transfer copyright back to the author. I asked, and Prentice-Hall graciously agreed.

So, now, here is the original content of the book, reformatted for the web (html and pandoc formats). Note that the text refers to AFS as working in 1997 - again, over 20 years ago. The OpenAFS organization has made great progress since then; please refer to their documentation for current workings. And there's also commercial offering, AuriStor. Both teams have asked in the past for ways to update the text to current versions. That'll take some work, but I do believe the underlying architecture and data management are much the same, while the implementation, feature sets, capabilities and performance are quite different.

The original and reformatted texts are now licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license, permitting sharing and remixing. I'll also add the small backstory and some random comments on AFS and the state of distributed computing (a.k.a. the cloud).

Richard Campbell

Managing AFS: The Andrew File System

  1. Preface and Introduction
  2. Architectural Overview
  3. AFS Technology
  4. Setting Up An AFS Cell
  5. AFS Volumes And Files
  6. Client Administration
  7. Managing Users
  8. Using AFS
  9. Archiving Data
  10. More AFS Administration
  11. Debugging Problems
  12. Large-scale Management
  13. Implementing AFS
  14. AFS Command Suite

Notes

The Web That Was