When I logged into lxplus today, Bash greeted me with:

-bash: /afs/cern.ch/user/m/melashri/.bash_profile: Permission denied

At first, I thought the file was missing, but the error actually meant AFS couldn’t be accessed, not that the file was gone.

Step 1 - Check what’s going on

ls -l /afs/cern.ch/user/m/melashri/.bash_profile

Which returned:

ls: cannot access '/afs/cern.ch/user/m/melashri/.bash_profile': Permission denied

I guess that is probably a classic sign that my AFS token had expired.

Step 2 - Renew Kerberos ticket and AFS token

kinit melashri@CERN.CH
aklog

After that, everything was immediately back to normal:

ls -l /afs/cern.ch/user/m/melashri/.bash_profile
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 193 Nov 24  2021 /afs/cern.ch/user/m/melashri/.bash_profile

Step 3 - Verify and relax

Logging out and back in showed no more permission errors. It turned out to be just an expired Kerberos session, not a permissions or ownership problem. Running kinit followed by aklog is usually enough to restore access to your AFS home on lxplus.