Major differences from Athena 9

Debathena has made some different design decisions from those Athena has made. Below are some of the more important ones:

• While Athena requires that one either have a non-Athena RHEL machine or install the entire Athena environment for things to work correctly, Debathena allows a user to select any desired level of Athena compatibility. Debathena has been carefully designed so that each package follows Debian policy as closely as possible and can be uninstalled cleanly; thus you can change the level of Athena compatibility that you want on a machine.
• On Debathena, /usr/athena and /bin/athena paths are used only for compatibility (these are in fact just symlinks); they are not in the user’s PATH or LD_LIBRARY_PATH. This means that software designed to run on a Debathena machine but not depending on Debathena-specific software will work on other Linux machines.
• Debathena uses an automounter for /mit, rather than having the attach program manage symlinks there. This means that you can access lockers by simply using paths of the form /mit/locker, without needing to remember to attach the locker.
• Our attach program runs setgid attach rather than setuid root, and is primarily useful for using the add shell function and Zephyr subscription functionality.
• While Athena workstations manage user information by adding users to the /etc/passwd file when they log in, on Debathena, user information is retrieved directly from Hesiod via the nsswitch library. This has the advantage that information like the user’s shell updates immediately upon a change in Hesiod, rather than waiting for the user to logout. We wrote nss_nonlocal in order to avoid any security problems related to namespace conflicts between local and Athena-wide users. This results in problems with some legacy programs that do not deal with nsswitch correctly.