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Chapter 7: The AFS File System
AFS is a modern implementation of distributed file serving. The FNALU cluster is running AFS as a distributed file server in a production environment. Several other systems at Fermilab run AFS as well. AFS has several advantages over older file systems such as NFS (see section 2.6), particularly in the areas of:
All systems participating in the AFS file system have the same view of the file system. All files for a set of machines known as a cell exist under /afs/{cellname}. The cellname for Fermilab is fnal.gov, thus all files that are part of the AFS file system are located under /afs/fnal.gov. There is also a symbolic link (see section 6.3.5) to a shorthand version of the cell name, which is simply /afs/fnal. Other cells are also accessible. They are listed as directories under /afs, for example the CERN cell at /afs/cern.ch.