Re: Change default rwuser default security level

Robert Story <[email protected]> writes:

> How about a migration path? Add a warning at startup if rwuser is
> specified without a level. i.e. "Warning: no securityLevel
> specified for rwuser; defaulting to auth".

I think a warning is a good middle ground.

The question you're really asking is: is this default of auth without priv a sensible one or something that is worth breaking running code at some point?  Are we willing to cause existing working config systems to break because we believe that encryption is important enough that we're willing to cause them pain?  It may be, and I'm not saying otherwise, but it isn't a decision we should take lightly.

In the end, which is more important: stability and backward comparability or ensuring people default to "with encryption required".  Is it worth *turning off* support for rwuser?  Is it better to do that than having two tokens, and switching all docs/etc to the new one and just warning against the old?  What's the benefit to deprecation vs obsolesce but still leave it working?

As mentioned, this is well documented in the manual page:

By  default,  this will provide access to the full OID
tree for authenticated (including  encrypted)  SNMPv3  requests,
using  the  default  context.   An  alternative minimum security
level can be specified using noauth  (to  allow  unauthenticated
requests), or priv (to enforce use of encryption).

And does derive from a time where encryption was actually impossible for many.  We'd certainly make the default different if we wrote that code today.

-- 
Wes Hardaker
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