Re: [Auth]mds and Barry: MACS authorization

[John]

Mario D. Santana wrote:

> John wrote:
>  
>
> > In reviewing the MACS source code (0.5 CVS; is there a later version 
> > available???), and specifically the single login mechanism; I was 
> > confronted by two thoughts -
> >    
>
> The latest "stable" release is 0.5a, on June 5. There has not been a
> release since, because the next release will be almost completely 
> refactored.
>  
Well, that's going to make the manpower estimate I'm preparing a bit 
more difficult as i need to judge the difficulty of converting one 
module from PERL to C++. Contrary to your opinion I don't believe a 
rewrite to the extent set down in the core teams suggestion will be only 
1 man year, but then I'm not looking at the correct codebase.

>  
>
> > 1) Why are the system names, user names, and passwords for other systems 
> > stored in the authentication module? Would they not be better stored in 
> > the Profile module? [...]
> >    
>
> This was a matter of historical convenience in the 0.5a release. The 
> latest CVS (which is pretty much unusable atm) does exactly as you 
> suggest.
>  
Despite the fact that it documents otherwise? Well, add another task to 
the tasklist: reflect actual program into documentation. Still, I'm glad 
it does. Storing system passnames with other skeyed data is FrePort's 
design.

>  
>
> > 2) Should the authentication service use PAM on either the front-end 
> > (for the MACS login) or on the back-end? To avail ourselves of the many 
> > PAM modules already written?
> >    
>
> Yes and yes. There is a pam front-end in 0.5a (which I was using for my 
> machine's login service!) We have been thinking of ways to do the pam 
> backend but relegated it to the back burner for now. If anyone's 
> interested, I can explain the ideas we've had for this -- they're fairly 
> interesting.
>  
Please do; I'd like to see how well they mirror the same notes I had, 
but AFAIK were never implemented in FrePort. Seems like if I ask 
questions for long enough MACS and FrePort will end up being the same 
animal.

John Le'Brecage