Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Kerberos for Windows 3.1 Beta update

KFW 3.1 Beta 1 has been tagged and installers have been built.

An official announcement is soon to come.

Thursday, July 20, 2006

OpenAFS for Windows Large File Support is now available

Several weeks ago, OpenAFS.org announced the release of OpenAFS for Windows 1.5.3.  For Windows this release contains three major changes:

  • First, there are significant changes in the CIFS server compatibility with the Windows CIFS client.   The result should be a major improvement in the interaction with the Explorer Shell.
  • Second, this is the first AFS client on Windows to support the Inline Bulk Status RPCs.  The reason that this is a big deal is that instead of performing one RPC per directory entry the Windows client now performs one RPC for every 50 directory entries.  In addition, directory entries that are unreadable due to access permissions are temporarily cached as expired callbacks.  This significantly reduces the time required to obtain a directory listing or create/open/delete files.
  • Third, for the first time the Windows AFS client is capable of supporting 64-bit Large Files.  You can now use AFS to store DVD images.

With all of these changes I bet you can't wait to get your hands on this release

At long last, Kerberos for Windows 3.1 is nearing release

After more than seven months of waiting MIT Kerberos for Windows 3.1 is finally going to begin beta testing. This release will fix all of the bugs that plagued KFW 3.0 Network Identity Manager 1.0. The memory leaks, the principal name rejections, the non-en_US locale problems. They are all gone.

In addition, KFW 3.1 will not crash on Windows XP64 WOW64 simply because Microsoft failed to actually export tickets from the LSA even though the functions succeed. (This problem is fixed in Vista Beta 2.)

Along with KFW 3.1 will be a new version of the AFS plug-in installer. Now that the NetIDMgr APIs are truly stable the AFS plug-in can be integrated into an OpenAFS release. That said, the KFW 3.1 release will install on 64-bit Windows systems but there will not be 64-bit native support until KFW 3.2.

The most dramatic changes in KFW 3.1 are in the NetIDMgr.  The user interface is much more fleshed out.  In the main window tickets can be sorted in arbitrary ways by clicking the column headers.   The View->Columns menu allows the user to select which ticket properties should be displayed.   The properties include everything from principal names to lifetimes to enc-types to key version numbers.  Tool Tips are supported for the toolbar.   The font used to display tickets is user selectable.   Identities can be added without obtaining credentials via the Global Identity Settings.   The Kerberos 5 Realm configuration editor is complete.   Kerberos 5 credentials can now be obtained from FILE: ccaches.  In general, the overall look and feel of the tool is significantly improved.

I look forward to being able to announce on Tuesday July 25th that the installers are available for download.