From AFS to NetFile: Big Move for Mendoza

By Mary Brandel
04/19/06

Sometimes you just need a little push to do something that’s ultimately beneficial but difficult to begin. Such was the case for the Notre Dame Mendoza College of Business, which in March completed the first phase of a three-part project to migrate 100% of its users to the University’s network-based Windows-friendly file system, NetFile.

For more than a decade, Notre Dame has relied on the Unix-centric Andrew File System, or AFS, to store data for staff, faculty and students. However, as the number of computer users has increased at the University – and with over 90% of them being Windows and Macintosh users – AFS has been stretched to handle tasks it was never intended to perform.

Indeed, in a Windows-dominant environment, AFS is “a fish out of water,” says Dewitt Latimer, deputy CIO and CTO at Notre Dame. “It still does a great job on the Unix side of the house, but it’s not native to the Windows and Macintosh side of the house,” he says.

That’s why, three years ago, the Office of Information Technologies (OIT) implemented a network-based file system based on Microsoft’s Common Internet File System, or CIFS for short.  The OIT leveraged its relationship with Network Appliance, Inc., whose network attached storage natively supports the CIFS protocol, to make available eight terabytes of file space for the ND Windows and Macintosh user community, now known as NetFile.

But it’s now time to give AFS back to the UNIX community, Latimer says. And in cooperation with the OIT, Mendoza stepped up its efforts at the beginning of the year to do just that.

Making sense

With its 99.9% Windows environment, it made sense for Mendoza to migrate to NetFile, according to Tammy Vargo, technical support consultant and analyst at Mendoza. “We knew NetFile would work a lot better in our environment because we wouldn’t have to rely on the Open AFS client to connect to the network drives,” Vargo says. “We’d just have to map a drive [directly] to the server to have a connection.”

Mendoza and the OIT broke the migration into three parts. The first – which was just recently completed after a three- to four-month effort – involved migrating the personal data of Mendoza’s 230 faculty and staff. While daunting at first, “it actually went better than I expected,” Vargo says. A key reason, she says, is the change made by the OIT to WebFile which enabled that tool to effectively copy users’ personal data from AFS to NetFile.

WebFile, Vargo explains, is a ND-created tool that allows users to view their network file space from the Web rather than via a direct connection. One important enhancement that made the tool helpful for the migration was programming it to find duplicate files that existed on both AFS and NetFile and giving users the option of overriding the copying of those files or renaming them.

With those changes, WebFile “became a very useful migration tool,” Latimer says. In fact, “we’d be a lot further along [for those wishing to migrate to NetFile] if we’d had it from the beginning.”

But Mendoza’s migration was not without its challenges. One was logistical: scheduling a mutually agreeable time with each user to copy data over to NetFile. “It was time-consuming in that regard,” Vargo says. Although the migration began in September, the last user was finally converted in March.

A second challenge was running into the limitations imposed by the default space quotas on NetFile. “We had to request quota changes from OIT, which took a while, so we had to reschedule our appointments with some users,” Vargo says.

“We were migrating people who’d been at the university several years, so the NetFile default quota was considerably smaller than what some people needed,” says Terry McCoy, senior storage engineer at the OIT. 

A third issue was that the WebFile tool only allowed Mendoza to transfer two gigabytes of data at a time. Still, Vargo says, “the overall speed of how fast it transferred data was a lot better than what I expected.” In fact, the actual time spent in each user’s office performing the migration was less than half an hour, she says, including dealing with duplicate files. 

Next steps

The next phase of Mendoza’s migration will be to move shared departmental accounts and Web sites from AFS to NetFile. Currently, Vargo is working with each department to set up folder structures and appropriate access rights.

This is a challenge because NetFile’s file permissions don’t map into the Unix-based file system, according to McCoy. “With NetFile, there’s much more granular control than you have with traditional Unix file system permissions,” he says. “There’s a layer in NetFile that inter-operates with Unix file permissions at the directory level, but there’s no way to map those over.”

For instance, in the AFS file system, any user can create his or her groups and assign access controls and permissions for the group. However, in NetFile, only administrators have that privilege. The technology support group at Mendoza does have that status, as they have a designated organizational unit, or OU, but other schools at Notre Dame would need to ask OIT to create groups and assign permissions. “If you’re in a department that’s not very big, you probably don’t have an OU,” McCoy says.

The OIT plans to establish a way for more people to create groups and permissions that would involve creating a group via the campus directory and publishing it to Active Directory in NetFile, McCoy says. However, “we’re making a conscious effort not to use Active Directory as the campus-wide directory service because it’s not meant for that,” he says.

The third phase will be to examine the use of Courseware on AFS. But although the college is conducting a pilot this semester that evaluates the use of Courseware on the NetFile system, it will also be necessary to arrive at a University-wide definition of “courseware,” according to Latimer. “Courseware means different things to different people, and it’s very difficult to address the problem until we understand all of the things “Courseware” means,” he says.

For instance, a computer science class doing coding on a Unix workstation is a good example of Courseware that should stay in AFS, he says. But a student dropping a term paper into a file folder could just as easily do that using the WebCT Vista course management system or NetFile, Latimer points out.

 “We’ve been talking to faculty to determine how they – and their students – use ND’s Courseware, to make the best recommendation for its future direction.” says Educational Technologies & Services director, Molly Gordon. “We’ve completed our interviews of several faculty members, and are preparing to make a recommendation to the CIO. In the interviews, we uncovered several issues that we’ll have to address to arrive at a satisfactory solution.”   

Reaping rewards

In the meantime, Mendoza is now enjoying many benefits of having 100% of users’ personal data on NetFile. For one thing, performance is much faster, Vargo says. And whereas AFS didn’t support file-locking, NetFile does, so that two people can’t make changes to the same file at the same time. Users also get a higher default quota of storage on Netfile – one gigabyte compared with 500 megabytes on AFS. “We’ve requested even more, up to eight gigabytes for one professor doing a lot of research,” Vargo says.

Small annoyances will disappear, such as the multiple error messages that laptop users were accustomed to receiving from the Open AFS client when they were disconnected from the network. “Now, when the machine boots into Windows and you have a mapped connection to the NetFile drive, it will just put a note on the system tray that not all network drives could be mapped,” Vargo says.

More important, NetFile enables Volume Shadow Copy Service, which enables users to see seven days’ worth of backups through the Windows XP client, McCoy says. That’s a significant difference from AFS, which kept only one night’s worth of backups online. 

“That should cut down on support calls, which will save time because ultimately they’d need to call us to spin a tape,” McCoy says. “We don’t get as many support calls,” Vargo agrees.

Other colleges at Notre Dame may choose to follow in Mendoza’s footsteps. However, Mendoza recognized that a migration to NetFile would be difficult to accomplish without having technical support to help make the big move. “They [Mendoza?] realized the only way to get over the hump is to do it on behalf of faculty and staff,” Latimer says.

At the same time, Latimer says, “it’s not as daunting a task as most people think it is.”