INN/NNRPD Authentication for individual newsgroup access

[Aidan Cully]

Unfortunately, a job change has meant that I've had very little time
to develop any new code for INN, and what time I *have* had has been
devoted to other projects.

That said,

On Tue, Oct 19, 1999 at 09:09:09AM, Thomas Rother said:
> I understand that plain authentication through externals programs is
> already solved and done through the auth directive in readers.conf. But
> I can not see a way (at least no obvious one ;-) ) to include newsgroup
> access rights into an authentification process.
> 
> Questions:
> -- How can such authentification be implemented?
> -- Is it possible with inn 2.2 or 2.3 (I looked at the snapshots for
> 2.3)?
> -- Do we need some "nnrpd hacking" and has anyone done a similar
> approach before?

One of the things I tried to build into the external authenticator
protocol was extensibility..  (to be fair, I mostly copied the
interface from Highwind's product.)  Setting newsgroup permissions
was going to happen (while I still had time to work on this) by
adding an additional three keyword:value pairs to be returned by the
external authenticator:
Read:newsgroups
Post:newsgroups
Access:Read Post Newnews Locpost
These were to be handled analagously to the keywords in the "access"
sections in the readers.conf.

However, I discovered while working on this that the code I'd written
was too hard to work with.  If you want to accomplish this right now,
I'd very strongly suggest using the perl authenticator.  If you're
willing to wait another while, I can finish my Grand-Unified-
Configuration-Syntax parser generator, for parsing the readers.conf,
storage.conf, incoming.conf, and maybe eventually innfeed.conf, which
will bring efficiency improvements when running nnrpd in daemon mode,
and make the config file formats muchly much easier to hack.

With INN 2.3 seeming to come closer to fruition, I'll try to make
this happen quicklier.

Anyway, please use the perl authenticator, since I don't know if
anyone else wants to work on the readers.conf, and I can't give a
good estimate as to when GUCS might be finished.

HTH,
--aidan
-- 
Aidan Cully       "Billy's mother was enormous.  I looked at her, then looked
Not Panix Staff    at the trailer door, than back at her, and I was faced
aidan at panix.com    with my first real math problem."	-- Tom Waits