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AFS Overview

     AFS is an acronym for the Andrew File System, developed at Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, under a sponsorship from IBM. Today AFS is marketed by Transarc Corporation and has been chosen by the Open Software Foundation as the basis of its Distributed File System DFS.   

AFS is a network-distributed file system comparable to Sun's NFS but with some more advanced features than all but the most recent version of NFS. AFS distinguishes between client machines and server machines. An AFS client enables users to access data residing on AFS servers transparently as if they were stored on a local disk. AFS servers in turn provide disk storage for files and directories.

CERN has purchased licenses for AFS for all the common UNIX platforms on site and currently offers a limited public service, including some central AFS file servers.

For more information on AFS please refer to: /afs/cern.ch/project/afs/afsug.ps

which should be accessed via World Wide Web in the CERN Computing UNIX Workstation Support entry under 'Guides'.



Alan Silverman
Wed Apr 12 16:54:02 METDST 1995