Accessing your Siriad account

  1. Requesting access
  2. Changing your password
  3. Installation
  4. Authenticating to the SIRIAD.COM realm
  5. Common Issues

Shell access to Siriad accounts is available to customers. For security purposes, Siriad uses Kerberos for login authentication. In order to access your account, you will need to be able to use an ssh client which has GSSAPI capabilities (Windows users can use http://matthew.loar.name/software/putty/).


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1 . Requesting access

In order to obtain a shell account, please contact support <AT> siriad.com and we will provide you with one for use.


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2 . Changing your password

Prior to logging in for the first time, you will be required to change your password. Please follow the instructions at Changing your Siriad password.


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3 . Installation

To authenticate, you will need the kinit binary. The method of installation can vary depending on your OS.


Debian/Ubuntu

sudo aptitude install krb5-user


Fedora/RHEL/CentOS

sudo yum install krb5-workstation

The default /etc/krb5.conf file installed on most RPM-based distributions disables dns lookups for both the realm and kdc. You will need to enable those things in order to properly authenticate from these systems. Modifying the following options in libdefaults should do the trick.

dns_lookup_realm = true
dns_lookup_kdc = true


Windows

Please refer to our windows instructions.


OS X

The OS itself should have the binary installed by default.


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4 . Authenticating to the SIRIAD.COM realm

Once you have kinit installed, you should be able to login by first obtaining your credentials and then logging into shell.siriad.com.

kinit <username>@SIRIAD.COM
ssh -o "GSSAPIAuthentication yes" -o "GSSAPIDelegateCredentials yes" <username>@shell.siriad.com

Where username is your SIRIAD username.

Note that you can permanently set the GSSAPIAuthentication and GSSAPIDelegateCredentials options by adding the following lines to ~/.ssh/config:

Host shell.siriad.com
    GSSAPIAuthentication yes
    GSSAPIDelegateCredentials yes

If you have any trouble accessing your account, please contact support <AT> siriad.com.


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5 . Common Issues

The following error is most commonly due to GSSAPIDelegateCredentials being set to no (see above).

username@shell:/$ cd /home/username
-bash: cd: /home/username: Stale NFS file handle
username@shell:/$
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