[2420] in Kerberos
Re: krb_get_phost
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Joe Pato)
Thu Dec 3 10:44:25 1992
From: pato@APOLLO.HP.COM (Joe Pato)
Date: Thu, 3 Dec 92 10:05:57 EST
To: Marc Horowitz <marc@MIT.EDU>
Cc: kerberos@MIT.EDU, dce-tech@osf.org
In-Reply-To: Marc Horowitz <marc@MIT.EDU>, wed, 2 dec 92 19:51:54
v4 has an acknowledged broken convention (look at the comment in the
file) for generating host principal names (e.g. rcmd.athena), and a
function, krb_get_phost(), to enforce it.
v5 has no such convention at all which I know of. So, I propose the
following convention:
The first element of the principal is "host", and the second element
of the principal is the canonical name of the host, with all letters
in lowercase. There are only two elements.
. . .
Other comments?
Marc
This is very similar to the host principal naming convention used in the DCE.
There a host's principal name is:
hosts/<machine_name>/self
Which turns into a V5 principal structure with three components:
(1) hosts
(2) <machine_name>
(3) self
Where the machine name is also the canonical name of the host. The rationale for
the extra level in the DCE was that the principal name space is actually part
of the global name space - so each component except the last is a directory
node, not a leaf. Furthermore, in DCE 1.0 there was no support for polymorphic
objects in the name space (so a directory couldn't also be a principal node).
This is changing in the future (but not until DCE 1.1, so it won't hit the
streets until 1994).
If we are about to establish a naming convention for vanilla V5 host names, I
would appreciate considering adopting the convention that already exists in the
DCE. Also note that Marc's proposal will simply not work in a DCE environment
since "hosts/<machine_name>" is already a directory and can't be a principal
node until DCE 1.1.
By the way, this structure is the DCE convention. Application programs use
the "dce_cf_get_host_name" function to obtain the host's name, and the function
"dce_cf_prin_name_from_host" to obtain the principal name for a given host.
-- Joe Pato
Distributed Computing Program / East
Hewlett-Packard Company
pato@apollo.hp.com
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