How do I run a cron job with Kerberos authentication?
Nothing can authenticate to Kerberos without providing a password/encryption key. The same holds true for cron jobs. In practice, you typically have two choices for providing Kerberos authentication for any program: • A human types in a password on a keyboard. • A password/encryption key is stored somewhere on a machine Obviously, both of these also apply to cron jobs. So to provide Kerberos authentication to cron jobs, you would either have to have a human type in a password at the appropriate time, or store the password/encryption key somewhere where the cron job could read it. What I (and others) have done with success is the following: • Create a special “cron” user (possibly username/cron). • Use kadmin to place a keytab for that user on the workstation where you are going to use cron. kadmin: ktadd -k user.keytab username/cron • Use the -k flag to kinit to get a TGT for that user using the stored keytab. kinit -k -t user.
Nothing can authenticate to Kerberos without providing a password/encryption key. The same holds true for cron jobs. In practice, you typically have two choices for providing Kerberos authentication for any program: 1. A human types in a password on a keyboard. 2. A password/encryption key is stored somewhere on a machine Obviously, both of these also apply to cron jobs. So to provide Kerberos authentication to cron jobs, you would either have to have a human type in a password at the appropriate time, or store the password/encryption key somewhere where the cron job could read it. What I (and others) have done with success is the following: 1. Create a special “cron” user (possibly username/cron). 2. Use kadmin to place a keytab for that user on the workstation where you are going to use cron. kadmin: ktadd -k user.keytab username/cron 3. Use the -k flag to kinit to get a TGT for that user using the stored keytab. kinit -k -t user.keytab username/cron Note that this applies to any sor
