(Illustration by Gaich Muramatsu)
Hi all, I've just started playing with Coda here. All seems like useful stuff, especially when integrated with a Kerberos realm. One thing which would be handy though would be the mapping of several names onto a single user ID. The reason that I thought this would be useful was that many Kerberos realms append an instance value to the end of a user ID to designate the function of the principal (for example "nd/admin" to designate my administrative hat as opposed to my regular, joe user hat). Unfortunately, this principal cannot be used to log in to Coda, because there isn't a 1-to-1 mapping between the Coda user name and the Kerberos principal (and you don't really want to be creating multiple UIDs to deal with the same person under different principals). If there were alias support, you could create a user ID "joe", which could have n aliases, all of which would map to the canonical name "joe". Thus, the name on all of "joe"'s principals (ie joe/finance and joe/admin) could be used by kauth2 to get Coda tokens. You don't even need Kerberos for this: you might want joe to be able to login with his full name (eg "Joe Blow"). Anyway, I hacked a partial solution to this. Basically, you create a file /vice/db/aliases.coda (or whatever) and run pcfgen with the invocation pcfgen -a aliases.coda vice.pdb This compiles a hashed version of the aliases.coda text file into aliases.gdbm, which is read (if available) by kauth2 when it starts. The aliases.coda file is of the form <name> : <alias1> <alias2> .... <alias_n>. Blank lines and lines beginning with '#' are ignored. If you need to incorporate spaces within an alias, surround the alias with quotation marks ("). There's no way to include quotation marks in an alias right now. The diffs against coda-4.6.6 are on ftp://hplose.hpl.hp.com/pub/nd/aliases.diff.gz To enable alias support, you edit Makeconf and ensure that the line 'ALIASES=yes' is uncommented. You must also ensure that libgdbm is installed on your system. I've only tested this stuff on Linux 2.1.129 (RedHat 5.1), but it should compile OK on FreeBSD/NetBSD. Anyway, for anyone who is interested, try it out an let me know if it works OK. Also, I realise that this feature is probably in 4.7.x, but I haven't had time to look at that yet. Cheers, NeilReceived on 1998-12-08 11:11:45