Kerberos and DISCUSS

This document is not intended to go into the details of Kerberos; it only explains what you need to do in order to use DISCUSS. Basically you need to be registered with Kerberos, and each time you login you need to be ``authenticated'' by getting a set of ``tickets''. The procedure for this is explained below.

• On Athena, you have a Kerberos password if you are able to login to an Athena workstation. You will get Kerberos tickets automatically when you login.
• If you login to a non-Athena timesharing system to use DISCUSS, run kinit before using DISCUSS (it will ask for your username and password), and kdestroy after you are finished. It's not a bad idea to put kdestroy -f in your .logout file. If kinit fails, contact your Kerberos administrator. At LCS, this is Greg Troxel (username gdt@lcs.mit.edu).

If you do not get Kerberos tickets by doing one of the above, you will probably get error messages from DISCUSS mentioning ``Kerberos'' (such as ``Can't read Kerberos ticket file''), and will be treated as an anonymous user by DISCUSS, except for meetings on your local machine. If you have Kerberos tickets you will be treated as a Kerberos-authenticated user.