How do I retrieve basic information about an afs mounted filesystem

Given an afs mouted filesystem, can I discover what IP address or DNS name it is served from? Can I learn anything about the drive/partition it occupies on the serving machine?

Background: I am user (no access to root privileges[+]) at a site that makes extensive use of afs to mount remote disks. Most stuff on most machines exists in a giant tree under /afs, but in some cases a few files systems are mounted elsewhere. One such filesystem is available on some machines and not on others, and I would like to search for it in the big tree before contacting the administrators to ask for help.

[+] Which would be why I choose Super User rather than Server Fault, but I am willing to be migrated if that is believed to be advantageous.


Different parts of the /afs space is served from different servers. You can find out what volume a path is in by running fs examine on it, then running vos examine on that volume name will give you what server(s) it is served from. The whole tree is made up of volumes mounted inside of other volumes, so run fs examine on the path you are interested in.


Run fs whereis <file> (manpage) to see on what server(s) a file resides. If you want to know in what cell a file resides, run fs whichcell <file> (manpage). To see the disk space available on the relevant server partition, run fs diskfree <file>.

This is a little simpler than using fs examine/vos examine just for seeing what server a file is on, and vos examine may hang if the volserver port (7005) is firewalled off, or if the server with the RW volume is inaccessible.

When talking to administrators, it can also be helpful to know the AFS volume name that the file is in. To find that out, follow the answer from Klas. You can also get some stats for the volume with the -extended and/or -format options to vos examine.