incoming.conf length limits

[Russ Allbery]

Todd Olson <tco2 at cornell.edu> writes:

> It appears that in inn 2.2.2 the length of lines in 
>    incoming.conf
> is SMBUF
> which is 256 bytes

> This is problematic for the pattern: key

> QUESTIONS:

>    1) is this limitation removed in inn 2.3 or 2.4 ???

It was increased to 4KB, I believe in INN 2.3.

>    2) how likely am I to run in to trouble in 2.2.2 if I 
>       change SMBUF to be larger, say 512 or 1024 ???
>       (and recompile).  We are aiming for a non-binary service
>       so our needs are fairly small ...

It would probably be okay, but it would likely be easier to just change
that one limit to BIG_BUFFER, which is the change that's in later versions
of INN.

> (some might ask, why not just upgrade to the latest INN
> (... well, Cornell has local hacks to nnrpd to do kerberos proxying
> (    and to permit people to *read* news anonymously
> (    yet to require authentication for posting
> (
> (I've not yet figured out how to make nnrpd in 2.3 or 2.4
> (implement our policy (and or how to apply our local hacks).
> (
> (Also, I continue to need a traditional spool

Is this using Sidecar?  So basically you want to trigger a Sidecar
callback when the user tries to post, but not when they're just reading?

You can do that with the Python authentication hooks, which are called
with every attempt to do something like post.  The Perl hooks aren't, and
would require attempting the authentication up-front.  This should be
reconciled at some point so that they both have the same capabilities.

Other than that, you could hack something like this into nnrpd without
*too* much difficulty; basically, set up readers.conf so that no one can
post, and then add some code to CMDpost that rather than just looking at
PERMcanpost, instead does the Sidecar callback and uses that.  You'd also
need to hack the nnrpd banner to return 200 intsead of 201.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

    Please send questions to the list rather than mailing me directly.
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