How to get AFS for OS/2 to work on Athena

1. Caveats:

• AFS for OS/2 is not licensed by M.I.T. By using it you will be violating the license agreement. Piracy is considered a bad thing. The FBI will probably break into your dorm room and shave your cat. You have been warned.
• Transarc-style AFS and MIT-style Kerberos do not interoperate. When you are using the requestor, you will only be able to access world-readable directories (like your ~/Public directory and other special directories, see Section 3, below). Sorry. We'd like to fix this, but we need the source code to do so.
• It turns out that if several machines are all running the same executable in AFS space, and you release a new version of the executable, all the old programs will crash! This is related to the way OS/2 relies on being able to perpetually reference the file on disk, somehow different than the way UNIX works.
• Don't ask us for the software. We don't have it. Find it yourself.

2. Installation

1. Unzip the AFSOS2.ZIP file into the root directory of your OS/2 boot drive. (My boot drive is "D:". Modify these instructions accordingly).
2. In your CONFIG.SYS:
   • Add D:\AFS\DLL to your libpath
   • Add D:\AFS\BIN to your path
   • Add SET TZ=EST5EDT if not already set
   • Add IFS=D:\AFS\BIN\ANDREW.IFS
3. Configure the D:\AFS\BIN\INITFILE.AFS file to say

   D:\CACHE        # this is the location of the cache entries
   8000            # maximum number of 1K blocks in the cache
   200             # number of predefined cache files
   G:              # drive designator for the 'afs' tree
   D:\AFS\ETC      # location of files thiscell and cservdb
   H: \athena.mit.edu\activity\o\os2
   

4. Configure the D:\AFS\ETC\THISCELL file to say

   athena.mit.edu
   

5. Configure the D:\AFS\ETC\CSERVDB file to say

   >athena.mit.edu           #MIT/Athena cell
   18.70.0.6                       #prill.mit.edu.
   18.72.0.43                      #orf.mit.edu.
   18.145.0.25                     #agamemnon.mit.edu.
   18.159.0.34                     #chimera.mit.edu.
   

   The full Cell Server Database can be found on any Athena machine in /usr/vice/etc/CellServDB.
6. Reboot...
   
7. Run VENUS.EXE to start AFS.

3. Now What?

Requestor @sys Value

• The Athena os2 locker has a symlink from "bin" to "arch/@sys/bin" which illustrates this point. Try changing into the "bin" directory and see where you end up.
• This means that we could write utilities to do the right thing in the standard Athena locker conventions (like "add" to extend the path, and "athdir" to retrieve the correct path).
• That's "/afs/athena.mit.edu/activity/o/os2" to you buddy.

Permissions and acl Lists

• Since Transarc-style AFS and MIT-style Kerberos do not interoperate, the requestor can only access directories with permissions given to "system:anyuser". Unfortunately, this is tantamount to making everything you want to access from your OS/2 machine world-readable. This may not be what you want to do. There may be an alternative (see below).
• The "AFS distributed filesystem FAQ", posted in alt.filesystems.afs, states

  It is possible to have both users and IP addresses as members of an AFS group. By using an IP address like this you can specify all the users from the host with that IP address.

  I'll let you know just as soon as I get this to work. This is the response that I've gotten from accounts so far...

  Unfortunately, we are not able to process your request since this is not
  supported.  If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us.
  

  I will keep working on it.