Running the keylogin Command

Normally, the login password is identical to the secure RPC password. In this case, the keylogin command is not required. However, if the passwords are different, the users have to log in, and then run a keylogin command explicitly.

The keylogin command prompts the user for a secure RPC password and uses the password to decrypt the secret key. The keylogin command then passes the decrypted secret key to a program called the keyserver. The keyserver is an RPC service with a local instance on every computer. The keyserver saves the decrypted secret key and waits for the user to initiate a secure RPC transaction with a server.

If both the login password and the RPC password are the same, the login process passes the secret key to the keyserver. If the passwords are required to be different and the user must always run the keylogin command, then the keylogin command can be included in the user's environment configuration file, such as the ~/.login, ~/.cshrc, or ~/.profile file. Then, the keylogin command runs automatically whenever the user logs in.