TPC from EOS ALICE at CERN to RAL CEPH and SSS

Hello,

I am tryin to get the ALICE TPC test to work. The test involves a transfer from
eosalice.cern.ch to RAL Ceph instances. The xrootd directly connected Ceph
is configured with sss. When the TPC transfer is attempted I see the following
error message

Authentication with sss failed: Invalid keyname specified.

Immediately before I see that the /etc/eos.keytab on eosalice.cern.ch is opened.

TPC job 198: [2021-06-04 13:04:23.900081 +0100][Debug ][XRootDTransport ] [p06636710h76580.cern.ch:1095.0] Authentication is required: &P=unix&P=sss,0.13:/etc/eos.keytab

Do I need to add this eosalice. keyname to the Ceph sss keytab?

Thanks,

George

Hi George,

The EOSALICE instance is advertising that it supports unix and sss. I doubt you can get the EOSALICE sss key and import in the the RAL instance therefore, your best bet here is to allow outgoing xrootd RAL connections to authenticate with unix. The TPC key from the vanilla XRootD TPC protocol gives you a reasonable level of protection in this case.

Do you enforce some particular XrdSecPROTOCOL inside the xrootd daemon at RAL - for outgoing XrdCl connections?

Cheers,
Elvin

Hi Elvin,

Thanks for the reply.

The xrootd@proxy service on the Ceph gateway authenticates incoming connections with unix and uses the bespoken ALICE token lib for the furhter authentication

sec.protocol /usr/lib64/ unix
sec.protbind * only unix
ofs.authlib /usr/lib64/libXrdAliceTokenAcc.so

I am not aware of the XrdSecPROTOCOL env var so I haven’t set it. Did you say that it defines the auth protocol for the outgoing connections?

Sorry, I m not tottaly sure if we are on the same page because the error message I pasted above

TPC job 198: [2021-06-04 13:04:23.900081 +0100][Debug ][XRootDTransport ] [p06636710h76580.cern.ch:1095.0] Authentication is required: &P=unix&P=sss,0.13:/etc/eos.keytab

looks like it is associated with an incoming connection,

Best,

George

Hi George,

The XrdSecPROTOCOL can restrict the authentication options that the client can use when contacting an XRootD server.

By the looks of this message:

TPC job 198: [2021-06-04 13:04:23.900081 +0100][Debug ][XRootDTransport ] [p06636710h76580.cern.ch:1095.0] Authentication is required: &P=unix&P=sss,0.13:/etc/eos.keytab

this looks like your xrootd server connects to the EOSALICE instance (FST in this case) to get/put some data and if your xrootd server enforces only sss authentication then the keys will clearly not match. So at this point, it’s a matter of understanding what your xrootd server (gateway or however you call it) is using as authentication when triggering the TPC transfer. If you use a vanilla XRootD then you should look at your ofs.tpc directive. I am not familiar with your setup so I can’t really give you more details.

Cheers,
Elvin