Mike Shaddock <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> asks:
> This may sound like a weird question (and it is), but does anyone know of
> a site that has made the global /afs tree available via anonymous ftp?
> Thanks in advance.
I'm not surprised such a question has come up, slight variations
on that theme come up at umich.edu with some frequency. Certainly,
an anonymous site is "useful" in terms of distributing software.
There are also people who get confused about terms like
"system:anyuser" and "global internet access", so such systems
are also useful examples, both of why acl's are useful, and
why it's silly to panic about anonymous access to AFS.
The unfortunate downside is if such a site becomes popular,
bean counters at most institutions start asking what the
benefits are, usually with ultimately negative consequences.
For UM software, I've usually pointed people towards a
UM system that supports anonymous to just umich.edu, or
for umich people, other systems that allow general FTP
access given a uniqname, but that's definitely more restrictive
than your question.
I've known for some time of one site that supports HTTP access to AFS,
so URL's of the form
http://web.mit.edu/afs/...
will work. I presume this is quite intentional and a safe thing to
publicize.
For general FTP access to AFS, I found one site by using rxdebug and a
small amount of intelligent guesswork -
info2.rus.uni-stuttgart.de
I have no idea if they're really interested in providing anonymous FTP
access to AFS world-wide, so it might be kind to ask them before
publicizing it widely. Otherwise, they might instead become unfriendly
and start limiting access based on peer IP address or DNS name.
Depending on your purposes, a US site may be preferable in any event.
(To find this site, I looked for sites that had connections to the fileserver
that contained /afs/umich.edu/group/itd/archive/mac.ftp (a large amount
of PD and shareware Macintosh software), eliminated all sites at
umich.edu, then tried anonymous ftp until I found one (a) worked, and
(b) had /afs on it.)
-Marcus Watts
UM ITD PD&D Umich Systems Group
