Gang,
I thought some of you might be interested in a brief report on using
Xinet's K-AShare product to allow access to /afs from Macs.
K-AShare is nominally an appleshare server for unix systems. It's
currently available for IRIX, Solaris, SunOS, and HP-UX. It allows
a unix server to make its filesystems available to Macs.
The interesting thing about K-AShare is that it's server has a
command-line option that will cause it to authenticate Mac users with
AFS and generate a token. The latest version, 8.06, will test the
username/password against AFS rather than /etc/passwd if started with
this option. I wasn't quite happy with this because we have some Mac
users who don't have AFS accounts, hence I preferred the login
sequence of Transarc's login program:
try AFS
if success {
login with token
} else {
try unix
if success {
login without token
} else {
error message
}
}
Somewhat to my suprise, when I suggested Xinet make this change,
they did! They sent me a test version and I'm quite happy with it.
Presumably this change will ship with the next release. (Now if I
could just convince Apple to allow more than 8 characters to be
entered in the chooser's password field!)
See http://www.xinet.com for sales info.
-Mitch
