Cern Week 1

So this is it my first week at Cern is over. So what did I do.
First I had to go through the procedure of getting an Id card and sort out all the paperwork. This was not as easy as I though as everything was in French, which I don't speak. Further I had to sort out my Parking permit and other small stuff like a bank account and so on. After getting my logon name (ribalba :) and my desktop, I had to install it with scientific linux. This is a Red Hat clone especially designed for research facilities. While doing this I tripped over a kerberos Error. So I spent one whole day tracking it down and creating a workaround for it. The error was caused through a password hash in the /etc/shadow through wich PAM Unix allowd you to login but the afs mount didn't get a valid Token as this requires PAM Kerberos to get one. So in you have to put AFTpw in the /etc/shadow file to get PAM Kerberos run. Further you now use a little tool ccdbuser to add a user to your local machine which is in sync with Kerberos. I started reading the source code of the Project I am going to replace . Which is written in Perl and C and hardly documented (Designed 6 Years ago). Futher I started to gather some Use Cases / Descriptions and agreed with my Boss that the Requirements stage will be done in compliency with the UML standard. I got my own development Cluster which I am currently playing around with to understand how scientific linux and the current system work. That's about it. I have a really nice office which I am shareing with one other guy who is currently on holiday.

2 comments:

vext01 said...

Great that cern are using kerb/afs. As you probably read, nis is a pile of insecure crap if the network cannot be trusted. The only comment I do have about AFS is that it is far too complicated. I was put off by the 6 or so daemon components which make an AFS setup time consuming. The kerb part semed pretty straight forward however.

Perhaps PAM simplifies the whole process.

Still no pictures Didi. I wanna see if it really looks like half life. If it does you fit in well.

William French said...

Yeah sounds good but im with edd the people demand pics!