Kerberos v4 ending soon

This Thursday, we did the largest part of the final phase of Stanford's Kerberos v5 migration. Our account services database system has now moved from Solaris to Debian, from Oracle to MySQL, and from Kerberos v4 to Kerberos v5. This has a lot to do with why I've been exhausted this week (I've worked over 50 hours and will probably do some more work this weekend).

We're at the very end of a project that's been ten years in the making. Stanford first deployed Kerberos v4 in 1992 using the Transarc AFS kaserver as the KDC, with the full intention that it would be temporary until we moved to some Kerberos v5 implementation, probably Transarc DFS. Sixteen years later, we're finally turning off the OpenAFS kaservers and going to Kerberos v5 exclusively on May 15th.

Various people at Stanford have been working on this project fairly continuously since the late 1990s, particularly Booker Bense and Roland Schemers (Roland has now moved on to other things). I started taking responsibility for it about five years ago and it became my major project three years ago when we finally got funding to finish it. It's the biggest project of my career to date.

When we finally got funding and I was able to start working on it for a substantial percentage of my time, I went into the project with the intention to solve the large problem and do it right whenever possible. That meant trying to enhance the software where it was deficient rather than working around it, solving the large problem, and trying to improve the world and not just Stanford. Stanford University has been extremely supportive of that goal, and as a result, what's come out of the last three years is a bit staggering to look back on.

I was feeling rather down earlier tonight, mostly because I'm exhausted. It's been a very intense past six months, a very tiring week, and I've not had the energy and attention for other things that are important to me. But I started thinking about everything that we've been able to do as part of this project and realizing just how big this is and managed to cheer myself up a lot. Five years from now, ten years from now, thirty years from now, this is still something that I'm going to be proud of. That's a great feeling.

I was going to write up more specific details of how to tackle a project like this and do it right, listing some of the concrete results as examples, but yeah. Exhausted and low energy. Maybe I'll just do it over the next two weeks as a lead-up to May 15th. Immediately after that I'm going to the AFS and Kerberos Best Practices Workshop in part to talk about many of the things that we've written.

And then, for the first time in three years, all of my major projects will be cleared and I'll have several months to catch up on everything else, recover, and gather my thoughts before deciding what the next big project will be.