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[Cron-bug] Options for communication


From: Ryan M. Golbeck
Subject: [Cron-bug] Options for communication
Date: Wed, 07 Nov 2001 20:26:14 -0500
User-agent: Gnus/5.090004 (Oort Gnus v0.04) Emacs/21.1

Okay, here is what I see as our options for crontab/crond
communication.

1) Sockets -- So we can use either UNIX sockets which reside in the
   file system and appear as files, or a external port.  I think
   pretty much that using a tcp/ip port is pretty much out of the
   question because there is no way to provide authenication unless
   the user authenticates everytime they communicate with crond.  If
   we use unix sockets, it's the same problem.  Except we can install
   the socket as root and make it only writable and readable by root.
   This way we can gaurantee that a suid crontab program is okay to
   talk to us.

2) Pipes.  Same problem except there only sockets that are really
   nicely specified by POSIX are uni-directional sockets.  Which
   sucks, because we want crontab to be able to query crond for user
   information.

3) Shared memory.  Same problems regarding security (I think).  Though
   I don't know much about how shared memory works as an IPC, there
   still might need to be some form of authentication..

Now, it would be really sweet if we can find a nice form of
authentication that would work on both GNU and GNU/Linux.  But I don't
know what it is.

-- 
Ryan Golbeck <address@hidden>
Computer Science
University Of Waterloo

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