AFS: Other Improvements

Filenames

Like we saw with the introduction of Berkeley FFS (which added symbolic links and a number of other features), the designers of AFS took the opportunity when building their system to add a number of features that made the system easier to use and manage. For example, AFS provides a true global namespace to clients, thus ensuring that all files were named the same way on all client machines. NFS, in contrast, allows each client to mount NFS servers in any way that they please, and thus only by convention (and great administrative effort) would files be named similarly across clients.

Security

AFS also takes security seriously and incorporates mechanisms to authenticate users and ensures that a set of files could be kept private if a user so desired. NFS, in contrast, had quite primitive support for security for many years.

Flexible user-managed access control

AFS also includes facilities for flexible user-managed access control. Thus, when using AFS, a user has a great deal of control over who exactly can access which files. NFS, like most UNIX file systems, has much less support for this type of sharing.

Tools for server management

Finally, as mentioned before, AFS adds tools to enable simpler management of servers for the administrators of the system. In thinking about system management, AFS was light years ahead of the field.