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Milko is a free and open source server for the Andrew File System (AFS)

AFS is a world-wide distributed file system researched and developed at Carnegie Mellon University and commercially marketed by Transarc Corporation later acquired by IBM. In the early 2000s IBM decided to release the code as open source and it became the OpenAFS project.

OpenAFS has been almost alone on the market for AFS implementations but in the late 1990s the Arla project started at the Royal Insitute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden (by the same guys that created the independent Kerberos implementation Heimdal) The goal of the Arla project was to create a free and independent AFS client and server that was portable. Back in those days it was also considered important to have implementations of Kerberos and AFS outside of US because of export restrictions on cryptography.

The Arla project was for a while rather successful and developed an AFS client that was stable and portable and also the beginning of an AFS server that had basic features. However after 2007 the project went dead. There are probably a number of reasons for this, among them that the involved persons got jobs! Another reason is that a filesystem client contains a kernel mode part and it takes very hard work to maintain and keep it updated, even on Linux it is difficult for out of tree kernel drivers to keep up with the changes to the mainline source tree. Because of this the Arla project has been unmaintained for a number of years and is not working on modern systems.

However after often thinking on the Arla project and considering starting it again I came to the conclusion that it is the server part that is worth keeping. A server is user mode software that is easy to maintain and port. I think there is room on the free software market for an independent AFS server that has a small and clean code base and I hope to atract developers that want to help continuing this project.

Milko is a fork of the server part from the Arla project. So far I have updated the build system to modern versions of GNU autoconfig and automake. I have also updated the source code so it can be compiled on modern systems.

If you are an experineced AFS user you are welcome to start help testing Milko. If you have not used AFS before you could start by installing a precompiled package of OpenAFS on a Linux distrubition. Try both the client and the server and then you can begin working with Milko.

Slogan:

If there is multiple writes to the same file, are you sure that isn't a database?

To compile Milko you only need to have OpenSSL and either Heimdal or MIT Kerberos installed in adition to the most basic build tools. You build it with the commands:

./configure
make
make install

The default location is /usr/local but you can set the path prefix like this if you want to install somewhere else:

./configure --prefix="/home/b/bosse/milko"

The installed software is:

/usr/local/etc: config files like CellServDB and ThisCell.
/usr/local/bin: bos, vos, pts and "sked".
/usr/local/libexec: bosserver, fileserver, ptserver and vldbserver.
/usr/local/man: man pages.

To test an AFS server you first need an AFS client installed on a second computer, if you are running Linux there are precompiled packages of OpenAFS called openafs-client on both Debian/Ubuntu based distributions and on Red Hat. If you want to build OpenAFS from source you can find it at http://openafs.org/ Also if you want to use a Macintosh as an AFS client you can download a precompiled client based on OpenAFS from https://www.auristor.com/openafs/client-installer/

When you have a working client you can start testing the server:

Read milko/README.milko and then you are on youre own ...

appl    - commands to administer AFS, the most important commands
          on the server-side is bos, vos and pts while the central
          command on the client-side is "fs".
cf      - macros used by GNU autoconf.
conf    - configuration files like CellServDB and ThisCell and
          the man pages for them.
include - common include files.
lib 	- libraries used by both client and server programs.
  arla      - support functions for Kerberos authentication.
  bufdir    - handling f_buf/f_dir, what is that?
  editline  - small and compatible option to GNU readline.
  ko        - support functions to communicate with AFS cells.
              ("ko" is Swedish for cow, they produce milk and from
              milk you can produce "fil" witch is also the swedish
              word for file)
  roken     - compatibility between differnt UNIX versions.
  sl        - command line parsing and handling.
  util      - basic functions for hash table and linked list.
  vers      - simple functions to print version information.
lwp     - LWP stands for Light Weigth Process and is an old API
          for multithreded applications, this library translates
          LWP calls to pthreads.
milko   - the AFS server programs.
  appl      - applications related to the servers.
    bootstrap   - scripts to help start and stop the servers.
    sked        - a command to handle volumes.
                  (sked is Swedish for spoon)
  lib       - libraries used by the servers.
    dpart       - partition parsing and handling.
    mdb         - directory handling.
    mlog        - functions to write to syslog/stderr.
    msecurity   - handling of superuser permissions.
    ropa        - handles "callbacks"
                  ("ropa" is Swedish for "call out")
    vld         - volume,voldb<->afs interfrace.
                  This would also be the place where to
                  add caching of "vnodes", manybe fbuf's too.
                  contains the simple (stupid) volume and ro-volume.
    voldb       - file and directory vnode db.
                  There is today one backend of voldb: vdb_flat
                  vdb_flat is a flat-db to store inodes. Not very
                  smart, but should be efficent enough.
    vstatus     - the volume-node.
  bos       - BasicOverseer-Server
  fs        - File-Server (implements Fileserver, Volumeserver and
              Salvage from OpenAFS in one program)
  pts       - ProTection-Server
  vldb      - Volume Location DataBase-server
rx and rxdef - RX is the comunication protocol used by AFS.
          It can only use Kerberos authentication, se rxkad.
rxgk    - RXGK is the development of a replacement to RX
          that can use GSSAPI for authentication.
rxkad   - the legacy Kerberos authentication package used by RX.
ydr     - translates .xg files to c code.
          (this tool is called rxgen in OpenAFS)

There is a mailing list to discuss this project at [email protected].

Bo Brantén [email protected]

• Arla in Swedish means `early'. Most of the code has been written early in the morning.