[Auth]macs, Andromeda, DotGNU, and you

[Mario D. Santana]

Howdy!

I've been sort of out of things for a while. Got laid off and took 
something of an in-town vacation. I'm back, though, with a clearer 
direction for macs.

Since the beginning, macs was designed to be a general-purpose auth
system, capable of sitting in front of and protecting almost anything.
It's raison d'etre is to cross-authenticate, cross-authorize, and
cross-profile users from different stores. It has an internal user store,
but there's nothing special about it. macs is implemented as a series of 
daemons, and the current (prototype) implementation is in perl.

The way I see it, DotGNU would be just another system to protect. The
only user store would be the internal macs one. Andromeda plugins would 
act as macs clients -- one plugin each for authentication, 
authorization, and user data. I have no idea what Andromeda plugins will 
look like (does anyone?) but macs clients are fairly simple, so this 
shouldn't be a problem.

If other systems (besides a DotGNU SEE) are plugged into a macs
installation, users will be able to cross-authenticate among them. This 
may or may not be desirable.

The plugins would be configurable so that any macs installation(s) could 
be auth'd against. SSI across macs installations will have to be taken 
care of with something like Albert's Flysolo project.

So I'm thinking I'll just go ahead with the fully-featured (but hacked
together) prototype in perl. Andromeda client plugins will be able to
talk to this or any rewrites.

Now in order to meet the goals of DotGNU, macs would need to be rewritten
as a DotGNU service. But I have future plans for macs that are likely to
be interfered with if macs has to carry a whole framework around. (KISS!)
My original plan was to rewrite macs in C, piece by piece and where it
makes sense, once the prototype was fully functional. I don't know how
difficult it would be to make Andromeda plugins that would work with the
stand-alone vision I have for macs. Still, I would love to make macs a
part of DotGNU.

What do you all think? 

Cheers!

mds
--
The perfect gun is not incompatible with a certain nobility of
thought.   -- Mark Griffin