Node:Quick user setup, Previous:Quick server setup, Up:Getting Started
To access an SFS server, you must first register a public key with the
server, then run the program sfsagent
on your SFS client to
authenticate you.
To register a public key, log into the file server and run the command:
sfskey register
This will create a public/private key pair for you and register it with
the server. (Note that if you already have a public key on another
server, you can reuse that public key by giving sfskey
your
address at that server, e.g., sfskey register
user@other.server.com
.)
After registering your public key with an SFS server, you must run the
sfsagent
program on an SFS client to access the server. On
the client, run the command:
sfsagent user@server
server is the name of the server on which you registered, and
user is your logname on that server. This command does three
things: It runs the sfsagent
program, which persists in the
background to authenticate you to file servers as needed. It fetches
your private key from server and decrypts it using your
passphrase. Finally, it fetches the server's public key, and creates a
symbolic link from /sfs/server
to
/sfs/server:HostID
.
If, after your agent is already running, you wish to fetch a private key
from another server or download another server's public key, you can run
the command:
sfskey add user@server
In fact, sfsagent
runs this exact command for you when you
initially start it up.
While sfskey
provides a convenient way of obtaining servers'
HostIDs, it is by no means the only way. Once you have access to
one SFS file server, you can store on it symbolic links pointing to
other servers' self-certifying pathnames. If you use the same public
key on all servers, then, you will only need to type your password
once. sfsagent
will automatically authenticate you to
whatever file servers you touch.
When you are done using SFS, you should run the command
sfskey kill
before logging out. This will kill your sfsagent
process
running in the background and get rid of the private keys it was holding
for you in memory.