Programming in Kerberos

Wyllys Ingersoll wyllys.ingersoll at sun.com
Fri Jun 24 08:54:25 EDT 2005


brian.joh at comcast.net wrote:
>  I recently learned how to program MIT Kerberos with no previous
>  knowledge of anything Kerberos related.
>
>  If you haven't already, you should first understand how to use
>  Kerberos and also understand the protocol at a high level. Google
>  for the "The Moron's Guide to Kerberos" and play with kinit,
>  kdestroy, kutil, etc..
>
>  The MIT distribution includes an API description (in TEX format if I
>  remember correctly). However, this documentation is incomplete, out
>  of date, and more of a reference than a tutorial. The best
>  documentation is the actual source code. I read the source to kinit
>  and some of the library to learn how to write Kerberos programs.
>
>  The nice thing about open source software is that if you really want
>  to know how something works, you can look at the source. On the flip
>  side, documentation is often less of a priority, so sometimes you
>  HAVE to look at the source code.

You also have to be aware that not all of the interfaces in the source
code are actually recommended for public use.   There are quite a few
deprecated interfaces that are still around for backwards compatibility
with older programs, but that nonetheless should NOT be used in new
programs.  

=Wyllys



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