[OpenAFS] Is PAM necessary

[Martin Schulz]

Why don't you pick a linux distribution of your choice? There are so
many updates necessary on regular basis that I (personally) do not
want to compile and install all the stuff over and over again. 

This is efficiency particularly important if you're a small department. 

No, you do not need PAM to use AFS. However if you want to put the
users home directories in AFS, you will have to make sure that the
users have obtained their tokens (and their TgT, if you decide to go
with krb5) *before* any attempts to accesses to the home dir are made. 

You could incorporate this functionality into the login program, the
xdm program, the sshd and any other program that gives users some kind
of access to their files. The other way is to make all these program
use PAM (currently, the linux distributor does this part of work) and
configure PAM to do the AFS stuff. 

See also 
http://www.mathematik.uni-karlsruhe.de/~schulz/Unix/afs/afs-krb5.html

Yours,
-- 
Martin Schulz                             schulz@iwrmm.math.uni-karlsruhe.de
Uni Karlsruhe, Institut f. wissenschaftliches Rechnen u. math. Modellbildung
Engesser Str. 6, 76128 Karlsruhe