[HCoop-Discuss] AFS choices

[Derrick Brashear]

On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 1:35 PM, Adam Chlipala<adamc at hcoop.net> wrote:
> Franklin Gordon Bynum wrote:
>> As for AFS, the benefits may outweigh the costs if we use it for home directories only.
>
> I'd like to suggest the additional alternative of letting members
> choose, at sign-up and upon later request, whether they want local or
> AFS home directories.  We could split members across different
> (virtual?) machines based on their decisions, or we might be able to get
> Linux to handle this kind of split nicely over a single kernel.
>
> (I would go for a local home directory, for simplicity of access with
> standard tools like public key SSH.)

Kernel doesn't matter. You can split homedirs regardless. Depending on
directory service or flat passwd file, it's easy to either designate
an AFS path or a local directory as homedir, or just use a tree of
directories or symlinks in e.g. /home.