In large AFS environments, local tools are usually written to manage AFS more effectly. Today these tools are usually written in scripts. These scripts typically issue AFS commands and parse the command output. This is not a good practice as command output are not well defined. Their format or even contents can change. An AFS Admin API is needed. Today some internal C libraries exist and are used by the AFS command suite as well as the Windows Admin GUI. But they are not clearly defined for external use and not easy to use.

Here a set of Java Admin API is proposed. The goal is to make the API suitable not only for administrators to write custom AFS automation tools but also for developers to write general and powerful tools for easy and efficient AFS management. -- [[LeoShyhWeiLuan]] - 13 Feb 2002