Node:Quick user setup, Previous:Quick server setup, Up:Getting Started



Getting started as an SFS user

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.