Installing Kerberos and OpenAFS on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger
Below you will find instructions on how to install OpenAFS on your Mac OS
X box
Note: This guide is intended for people at the Department of Physics, Stockholm
Univeristy. It may prove useful for other pepole too, but some topics are clearly
site and field specific.
This guide will install some additional Kerberos tools and the AFS implementation
OpenAFS. I will in these instructions assume that you want install OpenAFS in
such a way that it is automatically started upon booting the machine, but that
your home directory is still stored locally on your machine. If you don't want
AFS to start automatically on boot, of if you want to get AFS tickets and tokens
automatically upon login, instructions for that will be given as special options
at then end.
NOTE: These instructions are for
Mac OS X Tiger. If you have an earlier version of Mac OS X, go here instead.
If you have any questions, send me an e-mail.
- Install Kerberos-Extras (optional).
Kerberos is included with Mac OS 10.4, but these extras will give you some
extra nice features, needed for some programs like Eudora or Fetch.
If you want to have them, download and install Kerberos-Extras from MIT. They
can be downloaded from this
page.
- Install the edu.mit.Kerberos file.
Install the Fysikum configuration file.The default Fysikum configuration file
is available from here (control-click
/ right-click). However, if you want to aquire AFS tokens automatically upon
login, you should instead download this
file (see below for more details in this case). Save it as /Library/Preferences/edu.mit.Kerberos.
Your Kerberos configuration is now complete. In
/Applications/Utilities/ you will find a program called Kerberos
with which you can aquire the needed tickets. If you don't like graphical
user interfaces, you can also get tickets by typing kinit
<username>@fysik.su.se in the terminal (or just kinit
if your username is the same on your local machine and on the Fysikum cluster).
- Install OpenAFS.
You are now ready to get OpenAFS working. Download the latest binary distribution
from the OpenAFS project
page and install it. Please note that there is a special version for Mac
OS 10.4. As of this writing, the latest version is 1.4.2. If you have problems
with it, you can also try later more experimental versions available on the
same site.
- Configure OpenAFS.
Change the file /var/db/openafs/etc/ThisCell
so that it reads
fysik.su.se
- Get access to your afs files.
After a reboot, you are now ready to access your AFS files. To
get access to your AFS files you should first of all have obtained a Kerberos
ticket with either the Kerberos application or with kinit as described
under
2. above.
You should then get tokens for the fysik.su.se AFS system. Do this either by
typing the command aklog
in the terminal (fysik.su.se is not needed if you only have OpenAFS configured
for one cell). You can now access your AFS
home directory in
/afs/fysik.su.se/home/<first_letter_of_username>/<username>/.
In the Finder, choose 'Go->Go to folder...' and enter this address to get
there or cd to that path in ther terminal.
- Laptop optional setup.
The setup above works for both stationary computers and laptops. However,
on laptops, OpenAFS could be a little bit unstable/unpredictable if you
try to access afs disks when you are not connected. If you want to circumvent
this, move the folder 'OpenAFS' from '/Library/StartupItems' to a new folder
'/Library/StartupItems-disabled'. This means that AFS is not loaded automatically
on boot. You then have to start OpenAFS manually by typing:
sudo /Library/StartupItems-disabled/OpenAFS/OpenAFS
start
in a terminal window. In the same manner, if you want to stop OpenAFS, you
instead type
sudo /Library/StartupItems-disabled/OpenAFS/OpenAFS
stop
in a terminal window.
If you plan on doing this often, you might want to add an alias for this in your
login file (.cshrc e.g.).
Optional installs/configurations
NOTE: The optional installs/configurations below have not
been tested with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Please try them out if you want to though.
- Automatic Kerberos tickets upon login.
You can configure your machine to
automatically give you a Kerberos ticket when you log in. If you want to
do this, follow
the
instructions
about Post-Login
Kerberos Authentication here.
If you have the same username and password on your Mac OS X machine and
the
Fysikum cluster you will with this method get a Kerberos ticket when logging
in.
- Automatic AFS tokens upon login.
It is possible to also configure your machine
to automatically give you an AFS token when logging in (this requires that
you
have configured
your machine for obtaining automatic Kerberos tickets above). It goes as
follows:
a) Download and install kfm_aklog as
explained here.
b) Make sure you have used the correct version of edu.mit.Kerberos above. It
should contain the following line in the [libdefaults] area:
login_logout_notification = "aklog"
You will now get AFS tokens automatically when you log in.
- Enabling all AFS users on Fysikum and having their AFS directories as their
home directories on the MacOS X machine.
If you have followed 1. and 2. above, you can make it possible for all users
on the Fysikum cluster to login to your machine (this only works from the
actual machine, i.e. not via ssh) and have their AFS home directory as their
home directory on the MacOS X machine as well. This goes as follows:
a) Download the Perl script nisync and install it as /usr/local/bin/nisync.
Make sure it has the correct attributes by executing:
sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/nisync
This little script will update the MacOS X NetInfo database to reflect the users on Fysikum. Execute it as root and your
MacOS X machine will contain all Fysikum AFS accounts as users. For convenience, configure to run this script as a cron
job once every second hour. To do this, as root type
setenv EDITOR emacs
crontab -u root -e
If the emacs window you see is empty, add a header that looks like
SHELL=/bin/sh
#min hour mday month wday command
and below that add a line to the crontab file that looks like
47 0,2,4,6,8,10,12,14,16,18,20,22 * * * perl /usr/local/bin/nisync
Note: In the last line, the empty spaces betwen the different columns needs to
be tabs (except between perl and /usr/local/bin/nisync, where there is a normal
space). Currently, there is a problem that a valid AFS token is needed to run
this cron job. I will investigate how this can be solved.
For users to be able to login, you have to reconfigure
your machine to use Kerberos for authentication. This is done by following the instructions for
Kerberos Authentication Required for Login, I. Simpler Configuration here. AFS users should now be able to login
to your machine and be brought to their AFS home directory automatically.
Note: In case the network or AFS is down, it is still possible to have a local password for each account. If you set
a password with the passwd command, this will be a local password that is only used for authentication if either the
network of the AFS servers are down.
Links
- For some information about using permissions and stuff under AFS, click
here.

This
page was last modified
2007-01-11
.