Call for Participation and Contributions

Last year the former German AFS workshop turned into an European event. It got organized outside Germany in Graz, Austria. This year the meeting is hosted in Rome, Italy, and we would like to encourage participation from more than the German speaking countries.

Several institutions located in or near Rome are long term users of the AFS technology. Among them are in alphabetic order:

CASPUR
a university consortium involved in high performance computing,
ENEA
a research institution for new technologies,
INFN
the Italian national institute for nuclear physics.

Besides it is used, too, at some of the Roman universities.

The workshop is mainly a platform for system administrators to exchange their knowledge and report use cases. Topics of interest include related technologies like Kerberos or LDAP and all supported operating systems. Here are just some ideas beyond site reports, which would be worth to be presented:

  • What are the advantages of OpenAFS at your site?
  • What does prevent its use in your context?
  • How does it compare to other distributed file systems?
  • What is your experience with respect to its application for cluster, grid, high-performance computing?
  • Is the BSD family of operating systems (FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD) employed somewhere?
  • How do you approximate RW replication?
  • Do you apply encryption on the client side and/or do you encrypt vicep partitions?
  • What does your SSO solution look like?
  • Is someone integrating smart-cards?
  • What does your technology stack look like?
  • How do you organize backups?
  • How about suitable underlying hardware?