How can I mount an AFS filesystem?

Update: In the end, it appeared that the problem was due to using the mainline kernel. Once the Ubuntu kernel was updated to include vga_switcheroo, I tried again and installing OpenAFS via apt-get worked just fine. Running sudo service openafs-client start starts OpenAFS and mounts the AFS directory at /afs, and I use klog username to authenticate via Kerberos.

Also, assuming I get OpenAFS installed, I'm not quite sure how to actually mount the remote filesystem to, say, /media/afs or some directory.

To specifically answer this part, this can be done by passing the -mountdir option to afsd, or modifying the /etc/openafs/cacheinfo file. To mount AFS on /media/afs instead of just /afs, pass -mountdir /media/afs to afsd, or specify the /media/afs directory in the first field inside /etc/openafs/cacheinfo. See afsd(8) and cacheinfo(5). AFS is traditionally always mounted on /afs, though; there's usually no reason to change it.

In order to pass the -mountdir option to afsd in Ubuntu, you need to modify /etc/openafs/afs.conf before the openafs client starts, and add the extra options to the OPTIONS or VERBOSE variables. It's probably easier to just modify cacheinfo instead.

Check this article: http://lug.rose-hulman.edu/wiki/HOWTO_Use_sshfs_to_mount_AFS/DFS_home

Hope this will help