OpenAFS

ASU uses AFS as the file server protocol for all student data. Whenever you login remotely to an ASU computer, your AFS space is connected as your home directory. This is really convenient, because all of your files follow you around. Beyond that, you can set up AFS on OS X and treat your ASU home directory like just another folder. My computer was set up in just such a way, until I upgraded till Lion.

I had checked ahead of time to see if there was a release of OpenAFS available for Lion, and there was. Yes, it was a pre-release, but it was the seventh release candidate, so I figured it wouldn't be that bad. I upgraded to Lion without a hitch, and then proceeded to upgrade OpenAFS, which was less successful. The installer went off without a hitch, but the kernel module wouldn't load, which meant the userland utilities couldn't actually connect to my AFS space. I hacked up an older installer to try to force it to install on Lion, but no luck there, either. There weren't any messages on the listserv yet, and the debug errors were a bit too cryptic to me, so I just gave up for a bit. I used Transmit to access my home directory via SFTP, which worked but was a bit clunky.

Eventually, a chain of messages on the OpenAFS listserv indicated that the problem was the installer package didn't correctly install the 32-bit kernel module when needed, causing an obvious failure. Helpfully, one of the developers said that a fixed installer package was available, and that the final release of 1.6.0 would finish once new RPMs for some Linux distributions were available. In the meantime, the OS X package was available via...AFS. This caused a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, since I could no longer access AFS on my Mac.

Luckily, ASU's computers still had access. I tried access grand.central.org's AFS space from various remote machines and was met with only failure. I finally tried my old friend, general.asu.edu, which was compliant and let me copy the OS X installer to my home directory. general.asu.edu has never let me down. It was the computer I first used as a relay when attempting to bypass ASU's restrictions on running some engineering packages from off campus. Yet again it came through. I don't know who still uses that  machine, but it is a friend of mine.