Hello Burt,

> A problem is that the documents I am using are the Administrator's Manual 
> from 2000 and the HowTo from 1999.

unfortunately, I think there is no better documentation.

The most reliable and up-to-date pieces of information are present in the FAQ
section and in the list archive (but you have to know what to look for :)

> >given a lot of care and education,
> >and certainly a lot of your time helping them when something goes wrong.
> 
> After years of using AFS, I never managed to solve the ".: not found" 
> (something like that) problem, where parts of the filesystem disappear.  I 

Hmm, I'm rather used to ".: permission denied"
as I do not use a proper pam module for my screensaver.
But it is just a minor annoyance forcing you to clog explicitely.
I suppose you mean real problems like when the cache manager dies.
Then of course it is a bigger trouble.

By the way, talking about friendliness - Jan, I want to bother you again
with that idea - let Venus use cached access rights on cached objects
until a valid token is present...
It would dramatically improve "friendliness" of the file system, without
sacrificing security. Coda does have support for the disconnected mode -
that's why we can both support network credentials expiration
and behave user friendly.

> ran into that same thing with coda when I made that mistake of accessing 
> the same thing through 2 different paths. Usually it required restarting 

A bit strange, it should not cause something like that - but now it is
hard to know what happened.

Regards,
--
Ivan