Following this link to the Kerberos pages will take you to a wealth of technical and non-technical information about Kerberos. A ticket is a block of data that enables you to prove your identity to a service, such as Eudora, SAP, HostExplorer or Better Telnet. Tickets are stored in the ticket cache on your local machine. Each user has one special ticket called the Ticket Granting Ticket , or TGT . The TGT is used to get other tickets that are specific to a particular service that you want to access.
Tickets contain a time stamp after which they cease to be valid.
By default, this is usually ten hours. The ticket cache is normally stored outside the application that needs the ticket so that applications can share the tickets. The most immediate advantage and disadvantage to this is that you usually only have to provide your Kerberos username and password once during a session. The advantage is that you may use several Kerberized applications during your session without being prompted repeatedly for your password. The disadvantage is that some operating systems, such as the MacOS and Windows 95, do not require users to identify themselves to the system.