Sunday, April 14, 2013

Mounting Stanford AFS Ubuntu

Stanford uses AFS to host filesystem space for students. Stanford also uses Kerberos for authentication. The combination of the two can be maddening to work with remotely.

These directions are to for people with running Ubuntu who would like to mount the Stanford afs to access files as if they were local. Restating 1nfty's directions:
  1. Install kerberos and afs related components
    sudo apt-get install krb5-user krb5-clients openafs-krb5 openafs-client
  2. Make sure /afs exists. If not, create it.
  3. Reboot to find /afs directory filled with pointers to afs volumes all over the world.
  4. Authenticate through kerberos and obtain AFS token by sequentially running
    kinit
    aklog
  5. Make soft link of your user directory to somewhere more convenient
    ln -s /afs/ir.stanford.edu/[path_to_afs_home_directory] ~/afs
These directions did not work straight out of the box for me. I'm pretty sure Narasimham's directions were all I needed, but I'm not sure. Stanford's directions were pretty bloated and I couldn't make much sense of them. If(When) I have to go through the procedure again, then I'll more thoroughly document the procedure and clean this post up.

Once everything is all set up, don't forget to authenticate before actually trying to access your files:
kinit
aklog


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