Overview

All user users 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.

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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 servers.