On Wed, 4 Nov 1998 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Have you considered having separate AFS cells for each department?
>
> >The College of Literature, Science and the Arts at the University of
> >Michigan would like to find out if anyone using AFS is aware of software
> >that will permit "distributed administration" of AFS. AFS, out-of-the-box,
> >allows all-or-nothing delegation of authority: either someone has the
> >authority to administer some aspect of AFS for the entire AFS cell or they
> >do not have the ability to do it for any of the AFS cell.
Yes, this is the solution that was suggested by our Transarc sales
representative and system engineer. The problem with this solution is that
we would need a minimum of 10 cells, possibly as many as 15. I don't have
any ideas on how we could effectively manage these cells, and ticket
management alone would make collaboration between departments difficult for
our users.
Some statistics: the lsa.umich.edu AFS cell has over 4000 users in 60
departments. It currently has 8 AFS fileservers and there are 12.5 Unix
support staff to take care of all Unix issues for the entire College
(including all AFS management). We have two "sibling" cells,
stat.lsa.umich.edu and math.lsa.umich.edu that were split off from the main
cell a number of years ago due to the need to delegate and manage
administrative authority. If we find a good solution for delegating
authority within the lsa.umich.edu cell, we will consider merging the
other two cells back into the main one in order to reduce support costs.
I appreciate all the replies I've been getting on this. So far, no one
has suggested a solution that is obviously what we want. I'll wait a
few more days and then summarize the replies to the list.
Mark Montague
LS&A System Services Team
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
