| Russ Allbery > Software > kstart | k5start Manual Page > |
(kinit daemon with keytab, renewal, and AFS support)
Maintained by Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org>
Copyright 2015, 2021 Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org>. Copyright 1995-1997, 1999-2002, 2004-2012, 2014 The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. This software is distributed under a BSD-style license. Please see the section LICENSE below for more information.
k5start and krenew are modified versions of kinit which add support for running as a daemon to maintain a ticket cache, running a command with credentials from a keytab and maintaining a ticket cache until that command completes, obtaining AFS tokens (via an external aklog) after obtaining tickets, and creating an AFS PAG for a command. They are primarily useful in conjunction with long-running jobs; for moving ticket handling code out of servers, cron jobs, or daemons; and to obtain tickets and AFS tokens with a single command.
k5start is a modified version of kinit. It can be used as a substitute for kinit (with some additional helpful options), but it can also obtain credentials automatically from a keytab. It can run as a daemon, waking up periodically to refresh credentials using that keytab, and can also check for the validity of tickets and only refresh if they're no longer valid.
Some of these capabilities have been included in Kerberos's kinit, but the ability to maintain tickets while running as a daemon has not and is useful for servers that need to use Kerberos. Using kstart allows the ticket handling to be moved out of the server into a separate process dedicated just to that purpose.
k5start can optionally run an external program whenever the ticket is refreshed to obtain an AFS token, and therefore can be used in conjunction with a program like aklog or afslog to maintain an AFS token. When built with support for AFS PAGs, it can also put the program in its own PAG so that its authentication doesn't affect any other programs.
krenew is identical to k5start except that rather than obtaining new tickets from a password or keytab, it renews an existing renewable ticket cache. It can be used to periodically renew tickets and optionally AFS tokens for long-running processes in cases where using a keytab is inappropriate (such as users running their own jobs with their own credentials).
As Kerberos programs, k5start and krenew require Kerberos libraries to link against. They have only been thoroughly tested with the MIT Kerberos and Heimdal libraries on Debian, but should work with the included Kerberos libraries on many other platforms.
Other than that, all you should need is a suitable C compiler. Neither program has been tested on non-Unix systems.
If you want the -t option to work, you need a program to obtain AFS tokens from Kerberos tickets. You can specify the program to use on your system with the --with-aklog option to configure; if that option is not given, the first of aklog or afslog that is found on your path at configure time will be used.
For AFS PAG support, one of Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris 11, the kafs library that comes with either Heimdal or KTH Kerberos, the kopenafs library that comes with newer OpenAFS, AFS header files (on any other platform besides AIX or IRIX), or AFS libraries (on AIX and IRIX) is required. AIX binaries with AFS PAG support may not run on AIX systems that do not have an AFS client installed due to how AIX handles system calls.
To bootstrap from a Git checkout, or if you change the Automake files and need to regenerate Makefile.in, you will need Automake 1.11 or later. For bootstrap or if you change configure.ac or any of the m4 files it includes and need to regenerate configure or config.h.in, you will need Autoconf 2.64 or later. Perl is also required to generate manual pages from a fresh Git checkout.
You can build and install kstart with the standard commands:
./configure make make installIf you are building from a Git clone, first run ./bootstrap in the source directory to generate the build files. make install will probably have to be done as root. Building outside of the source directory is also supported, if you wish, by creating an empty directory and then running configure with the correct relative path.
If you are using aklog, afslog, or some other program to obtain AFS tokens, give its path to configure with the --with-aklog option, as in:
./configure --with-aklog=/usr/local/bin/aklogThis program will be run when the -t option is given to k5start or krenew.
To enable support for AFS PAGs, pass the --enable-setpag flag to configure. It is not enabled by default. On platforms other than Linux and without the kafs library, you will need to add the --with-afs flag specifying the location of your AFS includes and libraries unless they're on your standard search path. For example:
./configure --enable-setpag --with-afs=/usr/afswsWhen enabled, k5start and krenew will always create a new PAG before authentication when running a specific command and when aklog is being run.
When using the Linux kafs module, the correct way to isolate kafs credentials is to create a new session keyring rather than a new PAG. This requires the libkeyutils library. configure will attempt to discover that library automatically and link with it by default. Pass the --with-libkeyutils, --with-libkeyutils-include, or --with-libkeyutils-lib options to configure to specify a different path to that library, or set the LIBKEYUTILS_* environment variables.
Normally, configure will use krb5-config to determine the flags to use to compile with your Kerberos libraries. To specify a particular krb5-config script to use, either set the PATH_KRB5_CONFIG environment variable or pass it to configure like:
./configure PATH_KRB5_CONFIG=/path/to/krb5-configIf krb5-config isn't found, configure will look for the standard Kerberos libraries in locations already searched by your compiler. If the the krb5-config script first in your path is not the one corresponding to the Kerberos libraries you want to use, or if your Kerberos libraries and includes aren't in a location searched by default by your compiler, you need to specify a different Kerberos installation root via --with-krb5=PATH. For example:
./configure --with-krb5=/usr/pubswYou can also individually set the paths to the include directory and the library directory with --with-krb5-include and --with-krb5-lib. You may need to do this if Autoconf can't figure out whether to use lib, lib32, or lib64 on your platform.
To not use krb5-config and force library probing even if there is a krb5-config script on your path, set PATH_KRB5_CONFIG to a nonexistent path:
./configure PATH_KRB5_CONFIG=/nonexistentkrb5-config is not used and library probing is always done if either --with-krb5-include or --with-krb5-lib are given.
Pass --enable-silent-rules to configure for a quieter build (similar to the Linux kernel). Use make warnings instead of make to build with full compiler warnings (requires either GCC or Clang and may require a relatively current version of the compiler).
You can pass the --enable-reduced-depends flag to configure to try to minimize the shared library dependencies encoded in the binaries. This omits from the link line all the libraries included solely because other libraries depend on them and instead links the programs only against libraries whose APIs are called directly. This will only work with shared libraries and will only work on platforms where shared libraries properly encode their own dependencies (this includes most modern platforms such as all Linux). It is intended primarily for building packages for Linux distributions to avoid encoding unnecessary shared library dependencies that make shared library migrations more difficult. If none of the above made any sense to you, don't bother with this flag.
In order to test the client in a meaningful way, you will need to do some preparatory work before running the test suite. Follow the instructions in tests/data/README first. Then, you can run the test suite with:
make checkIf a test fails, you can run a single test with verbose output via:
tests/runtests -o <name-of-test>Do this instead of running the test program directly since it will ensure that necessary environment variables are set up.
Perl 5.008 or later and the kinit and klist programs from MIT Kerberos, not Heimdal, are required to run the test suite. The following additional Perl modules will be used by the test suite if present:
- Test::Pod
- Test::Spelling
To enable tests that don't detect functionality problems but are used to sanity-check the release, set the environment variable RELEASE_TESTING to a true value. To enable tests that may be sensitive to the local environment or that produce a lot of false positives without uncovering many problems, set the environment variable AUTHOR_TESTING to a true value.
To Navid Golpayegani, for contributing the initial implementation of the -b option to background after the initial authentication and the -p option to save the PID in a file.
To Buck Huppmann, for contributing an RPM spec file and suggesting krenew.
To Adam Megacz, for pointing out that checking the executability of the aklog program isn't necessary and for contributing the code to propagate signals to a child process.
To Quanah Gibson-Mount, for pointing out various build system issues and missing documentation.
To Sidney Cammeresi, for catching a missing include in krenew and for providing information and suggestions about Mac OS X's default ticket cache and its effects on the -b option of k5start and krenew.
To Thomas Kula, for pointing out that k_hasafs has to be called before k_setpag when using the kafs functions.
To Thomas Weiss, for noticing that code restructuring caused the argument to -H to be ignored in k5start and that -H and -K should be diagnosed as mutually exclusive.
To Howard Wilkinson, for the initial version of the -o, -g, and -m support and further debugging of it.
To Sascha Tandel, for the initial version of -c support and reports of build problems when the AFS libauthent and libafsrpc libraries didn't work.
To Gautam Iyer, for the initial version of -H support in krenew.
To Mike Horansky, for the idea of copying the current ticket cache when running krenew with a command, thereby saving the ticket cache from destruction when the user logs out.
The kstart web page at:
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/kstart/will always have the current version of this package, the current documentation, and pointers to any additional resources.
For bug tracking, use the issue tracker on GitHub:
https://github.com/rra/kstart/issuesHowever, please be aware that I tend to be extremely busy and work projects often take priority. I'll save your report and get to it as soon as I can, but it may take me a couple of months.
kstart is maintained using Git. You can access the current source on GitHub at:
https://github.com/rra/kstartor by cloning the repository at:
https://git.eyrie.org/git/kerberos/kstart.gitor view the repository via the web at:
https://git.eyrie.org/?p=kerberos/kstart.gitThe eyrie.org repository is the canonical one, maintained by the author, but using GitHub is probably more convenient for most purposes. Pull requests are gratefully reviewed and normally accepted.
The kstart package as a whole is covered by the following copyright statement and license:
Copyright 2015, 2021 Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> Copyright 1995-1997, 1999-2002, 2004-2012, 2014 The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityPermission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.Some files in this distribution are individually released under different licenses, all of which are compatible with the above general package license but which may require preservation of additional notices. All required notices, and detailed information about the licensing of each file, are recorded in the LICENSE file.
Files covered by a license with an assigned SPDX License Identifier include SPDX-License-Identifier tags to enable automated processing of license information. See https://spdx.org/licenses/ for more information.
For any copyright range specified by files in this package as YYYY-ZZZZ, the range specifies every single year in that closed interval.
| Russ Allbery > Software > kstart | k5start Manual Page > |