AUTHLOG(5)

okay so bestie, welcome to AUTHLOG(5) — this one's straight out of the AFS File Reference section, and it's the entire lore drop on the AuthLog file 💖

🎀 NAME 🎀

• AuthLog — literally the file that traces Authentication Server operations 👑

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

okay so picture this: the AuthLog file keeps a trace of everything the Authentication Server (aka the kaserver process) gets up to on your local machine, and it also spills all the tea about any error conditions it runs into. It's giving ✨ receipts ✨, no cap.

Here's the vibe check on how it gets born: if the AuthLog file does not exist in the /var/openafs/logs directory when the Authentication Server starts up, the server process itself creates the file and drops some initial start-up messages into it 🫶. But if there's already a file chilling there? The Authentication Server renames it to AuthLog.old — and yeah, that overwrites any existing AuthLog.old that was already kicking it 💀. We love a fresh start, we hate losing data, it is what it is.

The file is in ASCII format, fr fr. Admins listed in the /etc/openafs/server/UserList file can flex the bos getlog command to display its contents — iconic behavior, honestly 👑. Or, alternatively, you can just log onto the server machine and use a text editor or a file display command like the UNIX cat command. Both are valid, queen 🌸. By default, the mode bits on the AuthLog file grant the required "r" (read) permission to all users. Everybody can read it, periodt 💅.

One thing to know and not be weird about: the Authentication Server records operations only as it completes them, and it cannot recover from failures by reviewing the file — that's just not what it does, sorry bestie 😭. The log contents are useful for administrative evaluation of process failures and other problems, though. So it's not useless, it's just not magic ✨.

💅 CAUTIONS 💅

⚠️ okay so this is the serious one and I need you to actually listen: the Authentication Server is obsolete and is provided only for sites that need to use it while they're preparing for a migration to Kerberos KDC. It will be removed in a future version of OpenAFS. Plan accordingly, bestie 🙈 — do not build your whole personality on a deprecated daemon.

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

Go read these next, iykyk:

• UserList(5)
• bos_getlog(8)
• kaserver(8)

🦋 COPYRIGHT 🦋

IBM Corporation 2000. http://www.ibm.com/ All Rights Reserved.

This documentation is covered by the IBM Public License Version 1.0. It was converted from HTML to POD by software written by Chas Williams and Russ Allbery, based on work by Alf Wachsmann and Elizabeth Cassell.

and that's the whole page, bestie — shipped by OpenAFS on 2026-06-25. slay, go read a log file 💅✨