If you’ve networked more than one or two systems together, you already know how difficult it is to maintain consistent user and password information across all your machines. Here’s a better way.
The first step when working on any multi-user system is logging in, which consists of typing your username and password and proving to the computer that you are who you’re claiming to be. The general term for successfully proving your identity to the system is “authentication.” The authentication process makes possible all of the other security measures provided by the computer’s operating system, such as determining who can read, write, and execute certain files and programs, who can kill certain processes, etc.
However, proving your identity to a single computer system isn’t all that useful if what you really need is access to resources residing on other systems located elsewhere on the network. This is exactly the situation that exists with the Internet and World Wide Web, which represent a distributed computing environment where network based storage, services, and processing power are available 24/7 to users logging in from all over the world.
So what’s really needed is a mechanism that would allow users from all over a network to authenticate themselves on any computer that is located on the network, thereby accessing the resources stored there. Luckily, there are a variety of powerful systems available for dealing with this problem, and this article will cover what they are and how to set them up.
Authentication Then and Now
Long ago, when no computer system was really connected to any other computer system each computer maintained its…
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