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Re: Kerberos support



Jaldhar H Vyas <jaldhar@braincells.com> writes:
JHV> IMAP 2000 claims to support  "MIT kerberos".  We apparently have two
JHV> kerberos implementations, Heimdal and kerberos4kth, which one should I
JHV> use?

Well, there are two different versions of Kerberos, Kerberos 4 and
Kerberos 5.  Heimdal is a reimplementation of krb5, kerberos4kth a
reimplementation of krb4.  Neither of these are "MIT Kerberos" per se, 
but AFAIK both are compatible with the respective MIT
implementations.  To confuse things further, MIT krb5 has a
compatibility library with slightly different include paths to allow
krb4 applications to be built against the krb5 libraries.  My
understanding, though, is that Heimdal does not include the
compatibility library.

I can think of one other package right off hand that could use
Kerberos.  Zephyr is an instant-messaging system used widely at MIT
and CMU; at MIT, at least, Kerberos 4 support is practically required.
However, Zephyr in Debian is not built against Kerberos (and is
therefore in main, not non-us).

Given this and that Kerberos is used at relatively few sites, it's
probably a good idea to skip Kerberos support in your IMAP client.

JHV> Also, there will be two packages, one for main and one for non-us/main
JHV> (because of SSL support.)  Should kerberos support be added only to the
JHV> non-us one or to both?

If you do support Kerberos, it'd have to be in the non-us version
only, given that both Heimdal and KTH Kerberos are both in non-us as
well.

-- 
David Maze             dmaze@mit.edu          http://www.mit.edu/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting.  Politicking should be illegal."
	-- Abra Mitchell



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