Recently I was told “I can’t remember anyone getting OpenAFS to work on their own”, by a staffer at my school. I took it on myself then to figure out how to get this working for students. And in the end I wrote an app that will automatically download and install the AFS client, then configure drives for you. This was an experiment in threading and using WPF instead of Windows Forms.
First the app goes and downloads the OpenAFS client, if it is a 64 bit machine it grabs the 32 bit tools first then the client. While downloading and installing these things it connects via SSH to a school server to get the location of the user’s home folder as well as verify the credentials given.
Once installation is complete the program runs ‘klog’, this goes to the AFS server and requests tokens in the cluster using the credentials given earlier. Once we are past the installing point all these actions need to be run on the campus network. When the program starts it tries to ping a couple internal servers, if it can hit more than half of them in under 75 milliseconds then it considers itself on campus; if it thinks it’s off campus, then it notifies the user. One small problem with the first release is sometimes this system gets confused by vpn taking slightly longer.
Now that we have working token the system recommends drive letters that are not in use as well as AFS spaces to mount including the users folder and ‘dept’ to start. The configure button will activate these drives, they are not set to persistent at this time.
Below is the github link, as well as the direct exe link:
Github: https://github.com/daberkow/RPI_OpenAFS
EXE: https://github.com/daberkow/RPI_OpenAFS/blob/master/OpenAFS%20Installer%20WPF/bin/Release/OpenAFS%20Installer%20WPF.exe