Dear Evgeny and Michael, Thanks for your tips. I will send the following bug report to Red Hat and the MIT Kerberos group.: -----------Begin Bug Report--------------------------------------- There appears to be a problem with the Kerberos ftp client (usr/kerberos/bin/ftp) auto-authentication routines. Here's a history of the problem I've had: I just installed Xemacs-21.1.11 (Carlsbad Caverns) on a new installation of Red Hat 6.2. I also downloaded and untarred the xemacs-sumo-2000-09-04.tar.gz into the /usr/local/lib/xemacs/ directory. When I attempted to "Update Installed Packages" (from any of the U.S. mirrors), I got the following error messages: Open Metalab.Unc.Edu Connected To Metalab.Unc.Edu. 220 Helios.Oit.Unc.Edu Ftp Server (Version Wu-2.6.1(1) Sat Jul 8 10:18:10 Edt 2000) Ready. Quote User "Anonymous" 530 Please Login With User And Pass. If I tried to open an ftp connection to /ftp.xemacs.org:/ I get: Opening FTP connection to ftp.emacs.org... Logging in as user anonymous... FTP error: USER request failed: 500 AUTH not understood Judging from the error codes, the problem is with the ftp client. Output from ps -Afl, during an attempt to login to ftp.xemacs.org from within Xemacs indicates that Xemacs is using /usr/kerberos/bin/ftp as the ftp client: 000 S root 12825 12715 3 73 0 - 562 read_c 03:45 ttyp2 00:00:00 /usr/kerberos/bin/ftp -i -n -g -v When I tried to manually try to log in to the ftp server using the command line above: # /usr/kerberos/bin/ftp -i -n -g -v ftp.xemacs.org I got the following error codes: Connected to xemacs.org. 220 ProFTPD 1.2.0pre10 Server (ProFTPD on ftp.tux.org) [gwyn.tux.org] 500 AUTH not understood. 500 AUTH not understood. KERBEROS_V4 rejected as an authentication type ftp> Therefore, there appears to be a problem with the Kerberos ftp client auto-authentication routines. The workaround is to specify another ftp client (e.g. /usr/bin/ftp) as Michael Sperber <sperber(a)informatik.uni-tuebingen.de&gt; suggested, ...or disable auto-authentication, as Evgeny Roubinchtein <evgenyr(a)cs.washington.edu&gt; suggested or -------------------End Bug Report-------------------------------------------------- Note for newbies: if you try to customize the variable efs-ftp-program-name immediately after starting Xemacs: M-x customize-variable <ENTER> Customize variable: (default nil) efs-ftp-program-name You will get the following error [No match] There will be no completions, and the variables efs-ftp-program-name and efs-ftp-program-args will not be available. You can get the efs variables (like efs-ftp-program-name or efs-ftp-program-args) to appear by first attempting to ftp a site: C-x C-f (In the mini-buffer): Find file: /ftp.xemacs.org:/ This will fail to open the ftp site of course, but you will then be able to customize the efs variables. Apparently, the customize-variable command doesn't source the appropriate files automatically. The behavior of customize-variable is no doubt obvious to the more experienced users, but I found it very confusing intitially. No doubt there are other ways to get access to the appropriate variables, but this worked for me. Note also that if you're using the sample .emacs file, you also have to set the efs-default-user to anonymous. Thanks again Michael and Evgeny for your help. Chris Rasch P.S. When I initially couldn't get customize-variable to work, I also grepped the efs files to find the variables in the source code. I tried replacing "ftp" with "usr/bin/ftp" in the line: (defcustom efs-ftp-program-name "ftp" in the /usr/local/lib/xemacs/xemacs-packages/lisp/efs/efs.el file, then restarted emacs. However, when I tried to ftp after restarting Xemacs, it seemed that my change hadn't had any effect--Xemacs was still using the Kerberos ftp client: 000 S crasch 26993 26984 1 73 0 - 616 tcp_re 11:31 ttyp0 00:00:00 /usr/kerberos/bin/ftp -i -n -g -v Why didn't my change have an effect? Chris