Abstract
A summary of the way people have chosen to implement shell aliases for
handling multiple sets of Kerberos tickets in the MIT Athena environment.
Overview
Around MIT Athena, most people who have cause to use multiple sets of
Kerberos tickets within a given login session have a set of shell
aliases for manipulating those ticket files. Since switching Kerberos
tickets involves setting multiple environment variables (one each for
Kerberos 4 and Kerberos 5), for practical use, these need to be
implemented as shell aliases, rather than as shell scripts, etc.
For some reason, I've been lame for the past 6 years or so that this
has mattered to me, and never really bothered to set up aliases, being
mostly content to change ticket files by hand. Finally, though, a bunch
of factors consipired to encourage me to do this properly.
I decided to write up an overview of what various notables around here
use for aliases, and to do a comparison, as part of the process of deciding
how best to implement this myself. That is this document.
Chosen users
An informed subset of the community was chosen. I looked at:
Dan Winship <danw>,
Greg Hudson <ghudson>,
Jonathon Weiss <jweiss>,
Marc Horowitz <marc>,
Matt Braun <mhbraun>,
Tom Yu <tlyu>,
Yonah Schmeidler <yonah>, and
Garry Zacheiss <zacheiss>>
Comparisons
| User | Modular | Sets Prompt | Score | Obtains tickets
|
|---|
| danw | Yes | No | 1 | Yes
|
| ghudson | Yes | No | 1 | Both
|
| jweiss | No | No | 0 | Yes
|
| marc | Yes | No | 1 | No
|
| mhbraun | No | Yes | 1 | No
|
| tlyu | No | Yes | 1 | No
|
| yonah | Yes | Yes | 2 | Yes
|
| zacheiss | No | Yes | 1 | No
|
Definitions:
- User
- Who it was.
- Modular
- Is there code duplication for each alias, or is the alias
structure modular enough to allow multiple aliases to reference a common
"function."
- Sets Prompt
- Does it change the shell prompt?
- Score
- How many of the previous two?
- Obtains tickets
- Does the alias detect if you have obtained tickets
and prompt you to get them? I don't know if this is a good idea.
I find it interesting that only ghudson and yonah bother
to make their aliases fit in 80 columns.
tlyu's aliases don't handle Kerberos 5 (i.e. KRB5CCNAME), so perhaps
they have not been udpated in some years, or I'm not looking at a current
copy.
It also strikes me as odd that no one bothers to set the WGFILE environment
variable, to reduce problems when using zephyr (either accidently,
or through an attachandrun script).
Last modified on $Date: 2001/11/11 00:45:16 $ (UTC) by $Author: jhawk $.