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This chapter focuses on tasks which should be performed in order to reduce the amount of work required on the part of the administrator to keep it up to date, secure, and functional.
Local user accounts are accounts created locally on one specific
workstation. They do not exist outside of that one machine and
cannot conflict with anything in the realm. They have a few
advantages to why some power-users would want them. Your authentication
to the local machine does not expire like AFS authentication does
and you have access to the local /home directory.
Note that by default no local space, including /home
is backed up in any way. For most users of Realm Linux the
recommended method to use the system is with your realm user ID, not
a local account. However, if such an account is wanted it can be
created with the adduser command. Be sure that the
numeric user ID and the text login ID do not conflict with any other ID
in the realm.
When logging in to a Realm Linux box under a local user ID (rather than your realm user ID), you will not have access to your AFS home directory immediately. After you successfully log in, you must run a script to gain access to AFS software and to your home directory. The name of the program you must run is /usr/local/bin/kreset. If your Unity/EOS ID is different from the ID you logged in with, you must specify your Unity/EOS ID as the first command line option, as in /usr/local/bin/kreset <userID>.
This script will prompt you for a password; the password you must enter is the
password for your Unity/EOS ID. After you successfully enter your password,
the script will print several status lines beginning with “zsub:”;
this is simply progress information and can be disregarded by the end user.
After successful authentication, you will have access to your AFS home
directory which is located at /ncsu/<realm-userID>.
As mentioned above, when you first log in as a local user you will not have access to your AFS home directory. For that reason, you must maintain a separate home directory for your local user, you cannot simply create a symbolic link from your local user's home directory to your AFS home directory. Attempting to do so will cause problems for you. Normally, a local home directory is set up for you by the adduser command.
If you plan to use the machine in a “disconnected” mode (i.e. not attached to any network), there are several things which normally start at boot time which must be disabled to allow the system to boot to the point at which you will be able to log in.
![[Warning]](/images/warning.png) | Warning |
|---|---|
Keep in mind that disconnected use is unsupported. Your machine will have very limited functionality. Danger lies ahead. |
OpenAFS does have some limited disconnected mode support that is rather experimental. If you would like to contribute some scripts and changes to help implement this, please do.
Among the services which must be disabled for disconnected usage are:
sendmail
AFS
Any custom-installed software package which depends on network connectivity to complete startup
Obviously, with AFS disabled, you will be unable to log in as your realm user, so you will need to have a local user ID. Because disconnected usage is unsupported, this is all we'll say about it for now, expect to mention things that we do know will be unavailable / non-functional.
Because AFS must be disabled, you will not have access to either your Realm home directory or any software lockers provided by AFS. There may also be locally installed software which will exhibit unusual or erroneous behavior in disconnected mode – please be aware of this possibility and do not ask for help or file a bug until you have confirmed that the issue is unrelated to being in disconnected mode.