Some notes on the AFS Servers running on the Windows operating system

I spent today working on the AFS servers.  At the present time
I have the servers working on Windows.  Here are some random
notes:

(a) The primary reason the server processes were not working
    were due to some mistaken assumptions within RX related to
    the handling of network interface reporting and mutex
    initialization.  These issues prevented the server processes
    from successfully initializing.

(b) The AFS Server Configuration tool is going to be disabled
    in future installations of the AFS Server component.  This
    will permit users to manually construct working AFS cells.

(c) The AFS Server Configuration tool insists on creating a
    kaserver instance.  New AFS cells should not use kaserver.
    There is no MIT KDC available on Windows (yet) but Active
    Directory is a perfectly good Kerberos v5 KDC and should
    be used.

(d) The AFS Server Configuration tool does not understand
    Freelance mode.  When Freelance mode is used on the client
    mountpoints should be added for "root.afs" in addition
    to the traditional "root.cell" volumes.

(e) The AFS server processes will fail if there is no
    public IP address to bind to.  This is a problem for
    mobile machines.

(f) volumes must be created on NTFS partitions that contain
    no other data.   The volume files are constructed in the
    root directory of the partition.  Perhaps the volume files
    should be created in a subdirectory off the root and
    support for "AttachAlways" files should be implemented
    in order to permit the use of partitions with mixed use.

(g) When there are no IP addresses available for the AFS servers
    to bind to, the bosserver repeatedly attempts to start them
    anyway.  Instead, the bosserver should monitor the network
    configuration and only start the servers when there is
    a public network address available.

(h) The NT file server volume management is based on NameI but
    its implementation is independent.  None of the improvements
    in NameI since the creation of OpenAFS have been ported to
    the NT file server.

(i) The OpenAFS installers do not register the TransarcAFSServer
    service (C:\Program Files\OpenAFS\Server\usr\afs\bin\bosctlsvc.exe)

(j) There are no directions available as yet for manually installing
    and configuring the AFS Servers.

Jeffrey Altman