Overview

All users

Sam's requirements for a scope statement:Abstract: What problem are we solving, who ill it benefit and how
will they take advantage of it?

Problem: How do things work today? Why is this not optimal? What
customer needs are there?

All user that are issued an MIT Athena Kerberos principal are also provisioned with an MIT email account and an AFS directory. When using the Athena computing environment, the AFS home directory also serves as the user's home directory. AFS also serves as a backing store for WEB.MIT.EDU.  This means that users have a very convenient way of publishing static web pages, if they have access to an AFS client.

Since AFS commands a relatively small market share, in the world at large, an AFS client is not a standard part of any operating system distribution. New operating system releases sometimes arrive with no client support. These cause an obsticle obstacle to easy access to AFS for some users. Many MIT users spend at least part of their time working on machines that do not have an AFS client installed. This makes AFS less useful for easily publishing static HTML pages or general purpose file sharing among collaborators.

AFS has also ended up as a critical path item on some projects. For example, some project deployments have been delayed until AFS issues for a particular platform have been resolved. MIT's IS&T has occasionally

 Also, Solution: A brief outline of the solution.

How customers will use the solution; how it ]solves there problem;
what properties of the solution are important to it being useful to the customer?

Interactions: How does this solution interact with other work that the customer is doing, that we're doing elsewhere and that other parts of the organization are doing.

Positioning: How do we want to position this project? Who is it
useful to? Where would it not be a good fit?

Long term strategy: How does this fit into our long-term goals? What future work can we build on this?

Marketing requirements: What work do we propose to do? Give specific requirements that are necessary for the work to be useful to the customers.

has often had to committ internal developer and system administrator resources to resolve these issues.

In recent years WebDAV has been gaining poplarity in the rest of the world. Nearly all operating system distributions come with WebDAV client included by default. In addition 3rd party commercial and open source products exist for both client and server implementations.

All of this leads us to conclude that a WebDAV interface to AFS would be useful to the MIT community. If the use of WebDAV to access AFS is sufficiently popular, this may also provide us with a migration strategy. We could, in theory, change the back end storage, and still meet the needs of the majority of the user population.

The proposed solution is to provide a way for users of a typical WebDAV client to securely authenticate to AFS and enable them to read and write files within AFS. This should make it easier for a broader segment of the MIT population to easily share relatively small files with collaborators and publish static web pages.

This solution is not intended to address the needs of MIT users wishing to create rich, dynamic web sites. Nor is this intended to be a solution for people wishing to share very large data sets. Nor is this intended to signal a long term committment to AFS. Finally this is not intended to displace departmental file serversProject plan: resources, timelines etc.