AFS is a standard networked file system used at U-M by ITD, the School of Engineering, and other schools and departments. For private applications, we use a system of access control that can allow specific machines or specific users access to a software package. This means it is easy to share applications among all our machines, or restrict access to only one or two machines. This means their computing environment appears the same on any machine where their home directory is their AFS home directory. The department won't have to be concerned with providing a backed-up file space for every user on the machine.
Users pay for their umich home directory via their computing allocation.
While it is an industry standard and is widely supported on IBM PCs, it is insecure and not scalable over a large number of clients. Application Support Applications, as mentioned earlier, are installed in AFS, and are available to all machines we administer, unless they are restricted via AFS Access Control Lists. All applications available on the ITD Login Service, including pine, news readers, IRC, and C compilers, are available. Customer and technical support varies with each application. This will start a dialogue to determine a.