[6194] in Kerberos
Re: Why TELNET sends arbitrary environment variables at all?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mario Klebsch DG1AM)
Thu Nov 9 15:33:27 1995
To: kerberos@MIT.EDU
Date: 9 Nov 95 14:15:29 GMT
From: mkl@rob.cs.tu-bs.de (Mario Klebsch DG1AM)
schwartz@galapagos.cse.psu.edu (Scott Schwartz) writes:
>djb@silverton.berkeley.edu (D. J. Bernstein) writes:
>| TZ does vary, but do you really want an ls -l in your home directory to
>| shift all the times by an hour when you connect from the next time zone?
>| Why should this be passed?
>If you launch an xclock, don't you want it to show the correct local
>time?
>XAUTHORITY is another one that is convenient to pass along, given a
>network filesystem.
Passing of environment in telnet is somwhat problematic. XAUTHORITY is
a good example. It contains a filename. It only makes sense to
transfer this environment variable when the new host also has access
to this file under the same path. DISPLAY can only be used on the new
host, when it still refers the same display. Display often contains
unix:0. Its absolute nonsense to forward this DISPLAY to a remote
machine. DISPLAY often does not contain a FQDN (full qualified domain
name). When I login into a system in another domain, my DISPLAY
becomes useless.
OTOH the forwarding of the environment often can solve common
problems. telnet is often used in cases, where forwarding of the
environment can be usefull.
But I think, this aproach is too simple. I think, it should be
modified in a way that the user can specify what to forward and what
not to forward on a host by host (and login by login) basis. There
should be a possibility to modify (canonicalize DISPLAY) environment
variables.
73, Mario
--
Mario Klebsch, DG1AM, M.Klebsch@tu-bs.de +49 531 / 391 - 7457
Institut fuer Robotik und Prozessinformatik der TU Braunschweig
Hamburger Strasse 267, 38114 Braunschweig, Germany
