Dear all,

I am experimenting with Ceph as a replacement for the AndrewFileSystem 
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_File_System). In my current setup, I am 
using AFS as a distributed filesystem for approximately 1000 users to store 
personal data and let them access their home directories and other shared data 
from multiple locations across different buildings. The authentication is 
managed by Kerberos (+ LDAP server). My goal is to replace AFS with CephFS but 
keep the current Kerberos database.

Right now I've managed to set up a testing Ceph cluster with 6 nodes and 11 
osds and I can mount CephFS using the kernel driver + CephX.

However, from the Ceph docs, I can't understand if this might be a correct 
use-case for Ceph since the default authentication method CephX doesn't have a 
standard username/password authentication protocol. As far as I understand it 
requires the creation of a keyring with a random password generated on-the-fly 
which can then be used to mount the filesystem using the CephFS kernel module 
(https://docs.ceph.com/en/latest/cephfs/mount-using-kernel-driver/#mounting-cephfs).

As for the Kerberos integration, I found in the docs this page 
https://docs.ceph.com/en/latest/dev/ceph_krb_auth/ which is still a draft even 
if the last update was almost 2 years ago. From this page, I don't understand 
if the current version of Ceph supports full integration with 
GSSAPI/kerberos/LDAP. Since the docs only refer to keytab files, I was 
wondering if Kerberos can only be used as an authentication protocol between 
Ceph monitors/osds/metadata-servers and not for mounting the filesystem.

Therefore I am asking
 - if anyone has tried Ceph for a similar use-case
 - what is the current status of Kerberos integration
 - if there are alternatives to CephX for mounting CephFS using kernel drivers 
which uses a username/password protocol

Thank you and best regards,
Alessandro Piazza
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