I'm moderately surprised that noone from MIT has responded yet, so
I'll do it myself. :-)
MIT migrated almost all of our fileservers to AFS over the last
summer. The setup that was used here:
~ system:anyuser: l
~/Private systen:anyuser: none
~/Public system:anyuser: rl
~/.plan If the user had a world-readable
~/.plan, it was copied into ~/Public,
and a symlink was made from ~.
~/OldFiles mountpoint for the backup volume.
Now, enough for the facts; let us get on to the opinions. :-)
~/OldFiles: JUST SAY NO
I happen to work for the user consulting group here, and volunteer for
another group which does user consulting as part of it's operation.
In spite of a huge advertising campaing, which included posters all
over the place, a global motd, a message on every single public
workstation's idle display, adds in the local papers, etc., people
were still most confused about the backup volume. Users didn't
understand why they couldn't remove it, or modify files in it. They
thought it counted against their quotas. They wanted to know why `du'
was giving them output that was different from `quota -v' (we didn't
install an afs-mountpoint-aware du here). My favorite was the user
who didn't want to be using that much extra disk space, so he *deleted
all of his files*, since they were already copied in ~/OldFiles!!!
Proposal:
If you're thinking about having the backup volume mounted at all
times, don't. Instead, provide a script somewhere in your standard
path that will mount the backup volume, and explain what it is and how
to use it. Your users will thank you. Your user-support group will
thank you. Life will be good. :-)
Thanks for listening.
-C
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