Using kAFS on Linux for Network Home Directories

Tuesday, February 25, 2020 - 3:00 pm3:30 pm

Jonathan Billings, University of Michigan, College of Engineering, CAEN

Abstract: 

The AFS filesystem has been widely in use at educational and research institutions since the mid-80s, and continues to be a service that many universities, including the University of Michigan, provides to students, staff and faculty. The Linux kernel has recently improved support for the AFS filesystem, and now some Linux distributions provide support for AFS out of the box. I will discuss the history of AFS, the in-kernel AFS client, and its performance compared to the out-of-kernel OpenAFS client. I will demonstrate some of the benefits and limitations when using AFS as a home directory in a modern Linux distribution such as Fedora, including working with systemd and GNOME.

Jonathan Billings, University of Michigan, College of Engineering, CAEN

Jonathan Billings has been a senior systems programmer at the University of Michigan for the past ten years, supporting a Linux computing environment for students, researchers and faculty in the College of Engineering. He has worked as a systems administrator at Carnegie Mellon, Rutgers and Princeton. He has given talks at the Ohio LinuxFest.

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BibTeX
@conference {246570,
author = {Jonathan Billings},
title = {Using {kAFS} on Linux for Network Home Directories},
year = {2020},
address = {Santa Clara, CA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = feb
}

Presentation Video