[4383] in Kerberos
Re: Help After Install
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Richard S. Park)
Tue Dec 20 03:09:01 1994
To: kerberos@MIT.EDU
Date: 19 Dec 1994 12:27:07 -0500
From: rpark@va.pubnix.com (Richard S. Park)
In article <GORD.94Dec18173235@enci.ucalgary.ca>,
Gordon Matzigkeit <gord@enci.ucalgary.ca> wrote:
>Somebody pointed out to me in private e-mail that there are 6
>netadmins at MIT who manage 1300 machines. If Kerberos includes a
>passwd database replacement, would this be managed by keeping private
>console passwords for each machine, but using kerberized rcommands for
>day-to-day administration?
>
Disclaimer: I am NOT an expert on this subject.
According to a technical document I was reading, Kerberos is but one part of
the Athena system. Athena is/was an attempt to build and maintain as
distributed a system as possible. The part which you are referring to is known
as Hesiod. This is a name server, based on BIND, which keeps all of the
/etc/passwd information for a variety of computers in one place. You can
obviously see the advantage of something like this: rather than keep an
/etc/passwd file on each computer, just maintain one file on a central server.
The other main parts of Athena are Zephyr, which is a real-time notification
program (to notify one of other users' presence on the net) and Service
Management System, which centralizes all of the configuration information
for many workstations and servers.
If you want to read more about this stuff, ftp to athena-dist.mit.edu and
look around.
