Alternative to perl_access and python_access?

[Felix E. Klee]

At Mon, 13 Jun 2005 08:18:34 -0700,
Todd Olson wrote:
> >I could simply use files named according to the username in question.
> 
> Hum ... I'd worry about this ... because many news readers can open
> multiple simultaneous connections to a news server, each spawning it's
> own nnrpd.  I think including the PID would be important ...

In our case, the user name uniquely identifies what groups a user should
have access to.

> >Of course one needs to take care that a file is not being read while
> >being written, but there's a simple solution for that: Write to a
> >temporary file and move it to the destination file.
> >
> 
> True!
> But is it really a worry?
> Since the the external authenticator has to complete and exit
> before the *_access runs, doesn't this guarentee the read will
> happen after the write?

But there may be concurrent authentication processes that interfere.
And if the PID is not included in the name of the files in question (see
above), it may happen that one process tries to read a file while
another one is still reading from it.

-- 
Felix E. Klee