How I Tried Installing OpenAFS on Linux for the Past 2 Years and Succeeded Last Night

This post serves as a post in case I forget the steps in the future and for those who are interested in installing the client for this distributed file system engineered originally at CMU.

I am using Gentoo Linux is an awesome O.S. as it is highly configurable. I took the pain of installing the system manually by command line. Even compiled the kernel manually so it will generate a sleek and thin kernel, removing unneccessary modules or built-in features that would slow booting and takes up memory. I love portage, the package management system, since every app you want to installed is compiled locally first which means you won't have conflicting binaries. It also calculates dependencies using the revolutionary USE flags.

1. Make sure in the kernel, module unloading is supported. Get this done by doing make menuconfig from /usr/src/linux. Recompile the module by make && make module_install. Copy arch/i386/boot/bzImage to the kernel image at /boot. Make sure the boot partition is mounted directly from its root at /dev/hda1. Reboot machine.

2. #emerge openafs-kernel
This will install a kernel module called openafs located /lib/modules//kernel/fs/openafs. Do not autoload this module. /etc/init.d/openafs-client loads the openafs module at boot time.

3. #emerge openafs
This will install openafs itself.

4. #emerge mit-krb5
Carnegie Mellon's AFS authenticate users by granting them Kerberos tickets. This will install a bunch of programs like klog.

5. Modify /etc/openafs/ThisCell to andrew.cmu.edu. Default client cache size is 200 MB. Kesden says, in AFS, any file that goes beyond the cache size will be dropped. Coda does it differently.

6. Reboot your machine.

7. To log on, do klog cbasah@ANDREW.CMU.EDU and enter password. Files are at /afs/.....