Determining Access to Foreign Cells
| Chapter 3. Displaying Information about OpenAFS |

## Determining Access to Foreign Cells

The Cache Manager maintains a list of foreign cells that it knows how to reach. A cell must appear in the list for you to access its AFS filespace. (In addition, the ACL on each directory in the pathname to the file must grant you the necessary permissions, and your system administrator must mount the cell in the local AFS filespace--by convention, just under the /afs directory.)

### To Display Foreign Cells

Issue the fs listcells command to display the cells you can access from this client machine. It can take several minutes for the command shell prompt to return. The Cache Manager stores the machines as IP addresses, but has the addresses translated to names before displaying them. To have the command shell prompt return immediately, use the ampersand (&) to run the fs listcells command in the background as in the following example.

       % fs listcells &
       Cell example.com on hosts
            db1.example.com
            db2.example.com
            db3.example.com
       Cell test.example.com on hosts
            test4.example.com.
       Cell example.org on hosts
            sv5.example.org.
            sv2.example.org.
            sv11.example.org.
       Cell example.net on hosts
            serverA.example.net

Checking the Status of Server Machines |  | Displaying Server Preference Ranks