MSUnet Wireless Now in Production; New Guest Access
05/17/2005
Last week, ACNS formally launched the MSUnet Wireless service into production, offering centrally-supported wireless Internet access for the campus community. All of the current “Wi-Fi” standards are supported; any computer with 802.11 capability will work with this service.
In addition to authenticated mode, where members of the MSU community use their MSU NetID and password to log in for full Internet service, MSUnet Wireless is now offering guest mode where no login is required. We believe that the many visitors to campus each year – from visiting scholars to prospective students and parents – will find guest mode very useful. (Initially, guest mode will limit Internet access to Web services.)
The ACNS network team is working aggressively to install new access points to meet demand around campus. For more details on the MSUnet Wireless project, including coverage maps, please visit:
We will also post major news about the campus wireless services here at computing.msu.edu.
If you have problems with MSUnet Wireless, please contact the ACNS Help Desk at (517) 432-6200 or use the “contact us” link at
Kerberos V Migration, Programming Interface Notes
05/11/2005
A discrepancy has been found in the way that the “fakeka” server deals with ticket lifetime compared to the “ka” server. In some c code we have used (and reused) for years, we make a call to ka_UserAuthenticateGeneral() with a lifetime of 1, assuming that the ka server would round the ticket lifetime up to the minimum (5 minutes on an old AIX implementation). The fakeka server will not round this value up. If you check &reason (the last argument to ka_UserAuthenticateGeneral()) you will see an error like this:
AuthServer returned incorrect response
In order for this function call to work properly, it is necessary to request a longer ticket life. On my SuSE 9.3 machine, the valid ticket lifetimes are in this range:
#define MAXKTCTICKETLIFETIME (30*24*3600)
#define MINKTCTICKETLEN 32
Note that this only affects calls to ka_UserAuthenticateGeneral() where the flags argument (the first argument) includes a + DOSETPAG flag.
If you are simply calling ka_UserAuthenticateGeneral() to verify a netid/password combination, then you don’t need to worry about changing the lifetime argument, obviously, as a ticket is not generated.
