[...]
> However, that's the easy bit - how would we handle authentication? It's
> not possible to just bring up a login window when the user tries to
> change into a remote directory. Furthermore, once we have managed to
> obtain a username an password for the remote system, what permissions do
> we give to other users than the one who logged in?
> This is a problem even without automounting - when sharing a HOME volume
> from a netware server in the past, I've always had to mount it in a
> different place for each user, rather than having a single mount point,
> on which each user employs their own authentication.
> One possible solution that I've considered before is this:
> 1. The system administrator can set default username/password pairs for
> logging in to certain machines, so any local user can use the volumes.
> (In fact, the sysadm would probably also supply a set of permissions)
Careful! The remote system sets up permissions and need to login for access
&c for _its_ security, local sysadmin has no business meddling in that
> 2. Individual users can register their own username/password/perms
> tuple, so that they can access other servers, or access the default
> server with their own credentials.
That sounds more reasonable. Some (cleaned up) kind of .rhosts... but
again, this will depend on whom the remote machine trusts, and you should
*not* give workarounds for whatever they choose to use.
The purely technical points are sure rather easy to solve, the hows and
whys (and more importantly, whynots) look a lot more complex to me...
-- Dr. Horst H. von Brand mailto:vonbrand@inf.utfsm.cl Departamento de Informatica Fono: +56 32 654431 Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria +56 32 654239 Casilla 110-V, Valparaiso, Chile Fax: +56 32 797513- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.altern.org/andrebalsa/doc/lkml-faq.html