MIT Kerberos: is it Thread-Safe?

[Booker Bense]

On Tue, 22 Jul 2003 Kent_Wu at trendmicro.com wrote:

> Are you sure Heimdal is thread-safe? Like a month ago I checked with
> them and theirs is not thread-safe either.

- Rumor has it that while heimdal is not guaranteed to be
thread-safe, in practice it works well enough. (i.e. there
are a lot of people running large OpenLDAP installations
using hiemdal gssapi in a threaded server and they don't
have problems. )


>
> Kent
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nikola Milutinovic [mailto:Nikola.Milutinovic at ev.co.yu]
> Sent: Monday, July 21, 2003 10:14 PM
> To: kerberos at mit.edu
> Subject: MIT Kerberos: is it Thread-Safe?
>
>
> Hi all.
>
> As the subject says, is MIT Kerberos thread-safe and if it is, which version?
>

- There is no currently distributed version that is thread-safe.
Some people at IBM have done the work to make a thread-safe
version of the API, but I don't know if this work is yet
available.

> OpenLDAP FAQ warns that MIT Kerberos libraries are not thread
> safe and that one should either use "--no-threads" when
> building it or build with Heimdal implementation. Now, I have
> gotten quite used to MIT Kerberos, have built several packages
> linked with it. It would be a drag to switch to Heimdal now.

- From a programmer's point of view there is not a large
difference in the libraries. In general, porting from one to
the other is mostly a matter of getting the correct libraries
in the compile line.

- Booker C. Bense