Simon's Musings

March 27, 2009

AFS & Kerberos Best Practices Workshop

Filed under: Uncategorized — sxw @ 1:01 pm
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Once again, I’m presenting at the AFS & Kerberos Best Practices Workshop. This years event is at Stanford University from June 1st-5th

I’m giving two talks, the first on prometheus, our new Identity Management System. The second is about how to contribute to OpenAFS. The abstracts are

Prometheus is an LDAP based provisioning system, which is designed to manage a wide variety of user databases, including AFS’s PTS and a Kerberos KDC. It is highly flexible in the databases it supports, and permits very fine grained delegation of control. It has a role-based access control model, and allows the creation and management of roles by any authorized user. It is instance aware, allowing users to create many instances of a primary account, request keytabs of those instances, and delegate particular permission sets to individual instances. Prometheus is designed to be a distributed as possible, permitting provisioning of system maintained by disparate groups without requiring those groups be trusted by the system itself. This talk will discuss the design goals behind Prometheus, provide an update on implementation progress, and demonstrate a running system.

and …

OpenAFS has a huge, daunting codebase, with a relatively opaque system of patch submission, review and application. It takes mountains of skill, and years of persistence to get your first patch into a state where it can be submitted, let alone accepted into the hallowed halls of the code tree…

Nonsense!

This talk will attempt to blow away some of the misconceptions with regards to contributing to OpenAFS. It will provide a first-timers view of the steps, both technical and political, to crafting a patch for submission into OpenAFS. We’ll take a whistle stop tour of the tools now involved in the process, from the code repository, to the patch review system and the bug tracker. We’ll talk about code review, bug triage and testing, with a view to inspiring participation in these areas.

Finally, we’ll talk about some low hanging fruit that anyone could get started on, and write their first bit of OpenAFS code …

In addition to keynotes from Morgan Stanley and Carnegie Mellon, the conference features a number of talks about research computing storage (including one from the nanoCmos project), and looks like it will have a great mixture of academic and commercial topics.

The hotel block (at the very reasonable Stanford Guest House) expires April 1st, with the early bird deadline being April 21st.

Theme: Rubric.