What is Open AFS?

AFS is a distributed filesystem product, pioneered at Carnegie Mellon University and supported and developed as a product by Transarc Corporation (now IBM Pittsburgh Labs). It offers a client-server architecture for file sharing, providing location independence, scalability and transparent migration capabilities for data.

IBM branched the source of the AFS product, and made a copy of the source available for community development and maintenance. They called the release OpenAFS.

Mounting your UMBC AFS Directory at Home

• Download and install the windows Open AFS client - during installation you will be prompted for an AFS cell name, you should enter umbc.edu
• When the installation is complete you will need to reboot. When you reboot there will be an icon that looks like a lock in the system tray. Click on this to bring up the OpenAFS dialog.
• Under the Tokens tab, click Obtain New Tokens...
• Be sure that the cell name is umbc.edu and go ahead and enter your username and password, then press enter. If everything went ok, you should see an entry under tokens with your GL username.
• Under the Drive Letters tab, click Add...
• Chose an unused drive letter, and enter the path to your root directory on GL (/afs/umbc.edu/users/u/s/username/), and click enter. If everything went ok, then you should see the drive letter added under the OpenAFS dialog.
• You should now be able to browse the drive in windows explorer.