Good idea, and probably Robert Waton has a lot more to say about this.

- Peter -



Neil Dunbar writes:
 > Hi all,
 > 
 > I've just started playing with Coda here. All seems like useful stuff,
 > especially when integrated with a Kerberos realm. One thing which
 > would be handy though would be the mapping of several names
 > onto a single user ID.
 > 
 > The reason that I thought this would be useful was that many
 > Kerberos realms append an instance value to the end of a user
 > ID to designate the function of the principal (for example
 > "nd/admin" to designate my administrative hat as opposed to
 > my regular, joe user hat). Unfortunately, this principal cannot
 > be used to log in to Coda, because there isn't a 1-to-1 mapping
 > between the Coda user name and the Kerberos principal (and
 > you don't really want to be creating multiple UIDs to deal with
 > the same person under different principals).
 > 
 > If there were alias support, you could create a user ID "joe", which
 > could have n aliases, all of which would map to the canonical name
 > "joe". Thus, the name on all of "joe"'s principals (ie joe/finance and
 > joe/admin) could be used by kauth2 to get Coda tokens. You don't
 > even need Kerberos for this: you might want joe to be able to login
 > with his full name (eg "Joe Blow").
 > 
 > Anyway, I hacked a partial solution to this. Basically, you create a
 > file /vice/db/aliases.coda (or whatever) and run pcfgen with the
 > invocation
 >   pcfgen -a aliases.coda vice.pdb
 > 
 > This compiles a hashed version of the aliases.coda text file into
 > aliases.gdbm, which is read (if available) by kauth2 when it
 > starts. The aliases.coda file is of the form
 > 
 > <name> : <alias1> <alias2> .... <alias_n>.
 > 
 > Blank lines and lines beginning with '#' are ignored. If you need
 > to incorporate spaces within an alias, surround the alias with
 > quotation marks ("). There's no way to include quotation marks
 > in an alias right now.
 > 
 > The diffs against coda-4.6.6 are on
 > ftp://hplose.hpl.hp.com/pub/nd/aliases.diff.gz
 > 
 > To enable alias support, you edit Makeconf and ensure that
 > the line 'ALIASES=yes' is uncommented. You must also
 > ensure that libgdbm is installed on your system.
 > 
 > I've only tested this stuff on Linux 2.1.129 (RedHat 5.1), but it
 > should compile OK on FreeBSD/NetBSD. Anyway, for anyone
 > who is interested, try it out an let me know if it works OK.
 > 
 > Also, I realise that this feature is probably in 4.7.x, but I haven't
 > had time to look at that yet.
 > 
 > Cheers,
 > 
 > Neil