Re: system call 227

[Chaskiel M Grundman <cg2v+@andrew.cmu.edu>]

Excerpts from internet.computing.debian.sparc: 17-Dec-101 Re: system
call 227 by Ben Collins@debian.org 
> syscalls. I'd like to know here in the heimdal source this gets called
> from.
AFS uses a variant of kerberos V4 to authenticate it's network traffic.
For filesystem access to be authenticated, a kerberos 4 ticket (called a
token by afs) must be transferred to the kernel. As afs is old and
crufty, it uses a syscall for this operation (the syscall is actually
used for lots of things, not just authentication management...)

heimdal's kinit, when configured to be afs friendly, will store an afs
token when you authenticate (and kdestroy will remove it). What is
probably going on here isn't even that, but the *probe* that these
programs do to see if afs is installed. On most platforms, they can
silently attempt the syscall, check for an error condition or signal,
and be on their way. On linux/sparc, they annoy the user :)