Manfred,
Derek did a good job of summarizing the differences from a user's
perspective. Having administered a cell with many naive users, I
found that the users with LESS Unix experience handled the few minor
differences in AFS better than the Unix hackers. They had fewer
preconceived notions about how things should work.
With the exception of tokens (that identify a user to the AFS
filesystem) and AFS Access Control Lists on directories, the unix user
will see no difference between an AFS file/directory and a local unix
file/directory. Programmers will also continue to write code that
reads and writes AFS files in the same manner that they write code
that reads and writes local unix files.
A token can be obtained on behalf of the user automatically at login
time. They do expire after (by default) 25 hours. So users who stay
logged in for more than 25 hours will have to know how to get new
tokens. This requires a simple command - it does not require logging
out and logging back in again. Default Access Control Lists (ACLs)
can be set on users new AFS directories that ease the transition to
the new form of file protection.
Pierette VanRyzin
AFS Technical Training
Transarc Corporation
