It is that time of year again in the United States when we gather with our friends and family and look back on the previous year and say thanks for all of the good things which have come our way and the bad things which have avoided us. One of the things I have to say thanks for this year is OpenAFS. Just about a year ago I started working with OpenAFS for the first time. Through OpenAFS I have met many new people and have had the pleasure of being able to help improve a product which touches the lives of many people on a daily basis whether they know it or not.
The improvements on OpenAFS for Windows were not done by one person.
Once again I wish to extend my thanks to MIT, Sine Nominee Associates, SLAC, UNCC and Skyrope for hiring Secure Endpoints Inc. to fix some bugs or add new features. I also wish to once again thank those individuals who contributed to the tequila fund. I must say that the tequila came in quite handy in late September and early October when Derrick, Jeff,
Chas, I and others were pulling our hair out tracking down thread safety
bugs which were causing file servers and clients to crash.
Special thanks also go out to Asanka Herath, Rob Murawski, Rodney Dyer,
and Derrick Brashear. All of whom are now friends and without whom OpenAFS for Windows would never have made such tremendous progress.
I must also remind the community of the contributions by Microsoft and
Larry Zhu without whom the Windows XP SP2 upgrade would not have gone smoothly for OpenAFS users.
The last year has produced so many improvements in functionality, stability, and performance that I do not want to list them all here again. Instead, you can read the November 2004 Status Report located at:
/afs/athena.mit.edu/user/j/a/jaltman/Public/OpenAFS/Reports/Nov-2004-Status-Report.pdf \\afs\athena.mit.edu/user\j\a\jaltman\Public\OpenAFS\Reports\Nov-2004-Status-Report.pdf http://web.mit.edu/jaltman/Public/OpenAFS/Reports/Nov-2004-Status-Report.pdf
Looking forward to the year ahead I see support for persistent caches, a new user interface, and effective confidentiality/integrity protection.
As always I will ask for contributions of developer resources, user interface designers, documentation authors, and most importantly money!!!!!! If you are interested in making a personal donation you can use the links from my web pages:
http://www.secure-endpoints.com/ http://www.columbia.edu/~jaltman/
Simply click on the "Donate" link next to "OpenAFS" to send money. Credit cards and PayPal accounts are accepted. All contributions under $50 will be used to purchase Tequila and Hard Cider. All contributions over $50 will be used to pay expenses related to electric, internet, and rent. :-)
The majority of time spent answering questions on the mailing lists, packaging releases, fixing bugs, testing, and tweaking the code to improve usability is unfunded. My ability to spend time on OpenAFS is directly related to the amount of free time available and the number of hours of AFS related work I am hired to perform. Donations are one way of ensuring that I will have more time to spend on OpenAFS and related technologies.
The 1.3.74 release is the best yet but there is still so much more to be done. Please help in any way you can.
Thank you.
Jeffrey Altman OpenAFS for Windows Gatekeeper Secure Endpoints Inc.
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