Can somebody give me a dead-simple, step-by-step guide to connecting to my school's AFS (Andrew File System) server with a given username and password?

It depends on if they allow access or the type of access. I'd get with the school's IT as no one here unless they work there will know how to access it without knowing the details about it.

It's more of a generic question than specific to my school, really. Using OpenAFS on Windows (which was GUI-based), I was able to connect to the server with all of the default settings, sans server/username/password, of course.

Generic but vague.. there are literally dozens of ways to possibly connect to your school system.. if you are more detailed, a step by step guide is probably more doable..

Are you wanting to use telnet or ssh to connect.. vpn.. and so on... ??

Any method (preferably secure) that mounts an AFS share on my computer.

For example, all the systems at campus automatically mount /afs/server/users/u/s/username/ .

Well, again, most likely I doubt they are going to enable for you to access a share to mount on your machine outside of their network over the net.. you'll most likely need admin privileges to perform this to even allow it.. seems to me they are using basic NFS setup locally which isn't going to work over the internet... I'd check with your school's administrator..

They support mounting over the Internet as I do it on both my desktop (Windows XP) and my laptop (dual-boot between Fedora and XP--and it works in XP). I assume they are using it over SSH or something because they are all for encryption, offering VPN clients and using SFTP over FTP.

I have a similar question as well, but first I'll contribute my solution to setting up my linux machine to access my OpenAFS account through Linux.

http://help.unc.edu/?id=3750&within=search-793939687

It's specific to our network at UNC, but maybe you can use it to your advantage.

Now I've fallen in love with this little setup, and I'm wondering if it is possible to setup my own little OpenAFS system. Is this possible for me to do something like this in my home network, or is this whole thing just a samba workaround? Ideally I want to setup my own file server, that logs in similarly to how OpenAFS works. I can't seem to find much information on creating your own OpenAFS server in linux.

this is as close to step-by-step as I can get without the details

go to www.openafs.org

#rpm -Uvh openafs-kernel
#rpm -Uvh openafs
#rpm -Uvh openafs-client

get the appropriate rpms above, I'm running 1.2.10

the AFS files will be stored in /usr/afs and /usr/vice

you will need to make sure that your schools authentication servers are in /usr/vice/etc/CellServDB

I believe the cache comes configured for 100 MB which should be fine unless you use lots of large files. Cache config options are in /usr/vice/etc/CacheInfo.

Also make sure /usr/vice/etc/ThisCell has the name of the cell you are connecting to.
Also check /etc/sysconfig/afs make sure AFS_CLIENT=on and AFS_SERVER=off unless you are trying to configure the server.

I don't reccommend AFS for a small/home network because of the overhead in learning how it works, but after learning how to use it I love it; And use it in a small-midsize academic research setting with Mac/Win32/*NIX clients.

if you are running RH /sbin/service afs start
check
/sbin/lsmod | grep afs
to make sure the kernel module is loaded.
afsd should then mount /afs and allow you to klog

-gabe