Patent ID: 8042165

Claim:
A method for requesting membership in a server farm, the method comprising: receiving, by a requesting server belonging to a first security domain, a name of a server farm comprising at least two servers, a passphrase, and a name of one of the at least two servers in the server farm; transmitting, by the requesting server, to the one of the at least two servers in the server farm a request for membership in the server farm and a first nonce, wherein the one of the at least two servers in the server farm belongs to a second security domain; receiving by the requesting server, an acknowledgement of the request and a second nonce; generating, by the requesting server responsive to the acknowledgement of the request for membership in the server farm, a hash of the server farm name, the passphrase, the name of the requesting server, the name of the one of the at least two servers in the server farm, the first nonce, and the second nonce; generating, by the requesting server, a Kerberos service ticket and a Kerberos authenticator; encrypting, by the requesting server, a portion of the Kerberos service ticket using the generated hash; transmitting, by the requesting server, the Kerberos service ticket and the Kerberos authenticator to the one of the at least two servers in the server farm; authenticating, by the one of the at least two servers in the server farm, the requesting server responsive to receiving the Kerberos service ticket and the Kerberos authenticator; transmitting, by the one of the at least two servers in the server farm, a Kerberos authentication reply; transmitting, by the one of the at least two servers in the server farm, a secret to the requesting server using a session key contained in the Kerberos service ticket; and granting, by the one of the at least two servers in the server farm, membership in the server farm to the requesting server.