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Login at PDC using Mac OS X

To connect to PDC systems from home using a mac, you don't have to install any new software. OS X comes with all the right tools, preinstalled.

Mac OS X Lion 10.7.2 and above

OS X Lion comes with Heimdal and kerberized ssh. Please proceed with the instructions for Snow Leopard to configure your login at PDC using ssh.

Note: Please update your OS X installation to 10.7.2 as the ssh in previous versions of Lion is broken.

Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Mac OS X systems with 10.4 or later have by default MIT Kerberos preinstalled, and all the necessary tools - ssh has Kerberos support. The following steps is all you need to configure your login to PDC via ssh.

Configuration

SSH

Create a configuration file on your computer:

~/.ssh/config

according to these instructions.

Kerberos

The file krb5.conf is usually located in /etc/krb5.conf and should at PDC have the following contents.

Get tickets and login

Follow the instructions under the heading "Using your Kerberos tickets to login at PDC" on this page. On Mac there is also an GUI application that you can use in:

/System/Library/CoreServices/Ticket\ Viewer.app

You can use this GUI to obtain and list Kerberos tickets. When you have tickets, you should be able to log into a PDC machine using ssh as usual. You will not get the accept-key-with-fingerprint-X question since host authenticity is verified with Kerberos instead. You should not have to re-enter a password!

How to transfer files

To transfer files to and from PDC there are several methods available. We recommend using an AFS client to transfer files to and from your home directory at PDC. You can also use scp to transfer files, for instance to and from the parallel file system on PDC resources.

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