Re: The Village Idiot Rides again!

Roger Merchberger <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> 1) Does the bikini server run as root, or does it suid itself to the logged 
> in user after the authentication?

Yes, and yes.  The server is split into two parts; the first part runs as root
to do authentication and switch user IDs, the second part runs as the
logged-in user.

> 2) The docs say to create a mailstore in the /tmp/bikini/... directory - 
> but the server says it finds the mailstore relative to the user's home 
> directory -- no user I know of has a $HOME in /tmp...

The docs and the code are out of sync, and the code is incomplete.  Before I
finished the authentication, you could only usefully use the anonymous mode.
When I added authentication, I broke the anonymous portion (which used the
/tmp/bikini/... mailstore).

This should be fixed.  The location (and even existence) of the anonymous mail
store should be configurable.

> 3) I created a ./supervise subdirectory and added a ./supervise/log/run 
> script - it's generic enough that it should run on most tcpserver-based 
> machines -- tho I'll go thru it again, just in case, when I install it on 
> my webserver.

Okay.

> 4) I set up bikini, got it to run the server, but I can't get it to 
> authenticate -- in the /service/bikini/run script, there's a call to 
> /usr/local/bin/checkpassword  <<-- is this just a placeholder, or does DJBs 
> checkpassword actually integrate fully with bikini?

Yes, I'm using it.

> If so, should any checkpassword work?

Yes, it should.

> Connected to mail.30below.com (127.0.0.1).
> Escape character is '^]'.
> AUTH LOGIN em1lcmNoAABpZG93YW5uYQ==
> +cGFzc3dvcmQ6

You never got a response after this?  You should have got either a "K" or an
"E" response, I think.  I haven't played with AUTH LOGIN much; I've been using
AUTH PLAIN.  Does that make a difference?  What gets logged by the server if
you crank the debugging level up?

> My checkpassword doesn't understand SASL, it authenticates from a 
> postgresql database -- but if it's DJBcompatible, it shouldn't matter, 
> should it?

No, it shouldn't matter.

Thanks for your work on this -- I've been unable to devote as much time to
this as I'd like, so my progress is (noticably) slow.

I'll apply your doc patches.

Charles
-- 
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Charles Cazabon                           <[email protected]>
BikINI project website:    http://www.qcc.ca/~charlesc/software/bikini/
GPL'ed software available at:     http://www.qcc.ca/~charlesc/software/
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