(Illustration by Gaich Muramatsu)
Good idea, and probably Robert Waton has a lot more to say about this. - Peter - Neil Dunbar writes: > 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 16:24:30