SSH and Kerberos

This page describes how to tackle the issue of CS managed machines (e.g. hulk and rocky) not allowing you to login without a password via SSH.

Please note that all the tools are already configured on Bruce, Rambo and Zarya.

1. Configure your OS

• Configure CentOS 6: SshKerberosCentos6

• Configure CentOS 5: SshKerberosCentos5

• Configure Mac OS X: SshKerberosMac

• More OSs coming soon...

2. Use the Kerberos tools

Get a ticket

Whenever you would like to log in to CS managed machines (e.g. hulk, rocky) just open a terminal and enter:

kinit your_cs_id

This command will ask you for the password of your_cs_id and obtain a Kerberos ticket for the account your_cs_id. Now you can login to the CS managed machines without using a password (provided that you are logging in as your_cs_id, of course).

If you would like to manually specify the lifetime of the Kerberos ticket, you can do it with the -l switch:

kinit -l 30d your_cs_id

The command above will issue a ticket with a lifetime of 30 days for the username johns.

You can obtain a ticket for any username if you have a password for that usename (so my username is js on the local machine I can still obtain the ticket for my johns CS account).

Listing your tickets

You can list all of the tickets that you currently posses with the klist command:

klist

Deleting tickets

There may be a case when you do not need the Kerberos ticket any more and you want to delete. No problem, you can do this:

kdestroy