[1071] in Kerberos_V5_Development
Re: [Doug Engert ] Krlogind and ss-962301
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Richard Basch)
Mon Apr 15 18:38:56 1996
Date: Mon, 15 Apr 1996 18:38:10 -0400
To: Marc Horowitz <marc@MIT.EDU>
Cc: Sam Hartman <hartmans@MIT.EDU>, krbdev@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <9604152219.AA12983@beeblebrox.MIT.EDU>
From: "Richard Basch" <basch@lehman.com>
On Mon, 15-April-1996, "Marc Horowitz" wrote to "Richard Basch, Sam Hartman, krbdev@MIT.EDU" saying:
> In message <199604152203.SAA00603@badger.lehman.com>, "Richard Basch" <basch@lehman.com> writes:
>
> >> The problem is I don't know how well HP-UX 10.0 works. (While we do
> >> have some such machines, I don't readily have access to them to test it
> >> out to comment further.)
>
> I had some serious problems when I tried to get streams working on
> hpux 10.x, which is why I reverted to berkeley-style stuff. Doug/Sam
> seems to have gotten streams to work, but I'm still a little
> uncomfortable. I'm probably also biased from my OV days, when many of
> our customers required the absolute minimum changes from the
> vendor-provided programs. It would be unfortunate for Cygnus or OV or
> any other kerberos vendor to have to change the MIT release because we
> were trying to be intellectual purists. This is nice for an
> educational environment, but is inadequate for the real world. If we
> want to make kerberos widely-accepted, it needs to be as painless as
> possible, and this means minimizing unnecessary changes.
I agree... we need to minimize changes. It is merely an opinion as to
which approach is the more appropriate one for minimizing changes. If
you mean to minimize changes from the vendor's shipped release, well the
problem is that the entire Kerberos distribution is not based on the
vendor's release; we haven't licensed that source code, especially for
redistribution.
With Sam's comment about the STREAMS mode not properly handling packet
mode, we may already have a foregone conclusion, which is to use the BSD
style interface in certain cases. As a result, if I have some time I
might look into what it would take to support packet mode in the STREAMS
implementation.
I may be viewing it as a purist to try to not have the OS specific
tests, but I have seen the code work on a wide variety of platforms
without the OS specific tests, and if this can be continued, then it
helps support OS FooBar X.Y which might be released in 6 months. I'd
rather see the problems fixed in a generic fashion, with forethought
toward future vendor offerings, not point solutions that make it harder
to address the next problem that comes up six months from now.
While this is somewhat of an acamadecian's view, it is also proving to
be useful as we integrate various technologies in this Wall Street firm.
I, too, believe in robustness and solutions that meet today's problems,
but I don't want to hit unforeseen support problems a year from now!
Maybe some businesses don't look past quarterly sales & expenditures,
but we try to ammortize our costs over a 3-5 year basis, including
ongoing maintenance costs.
--
Richard Basch
Sr. Developer/Analyst URL: http://web.mit.edu/basch/www/home.html
Lehman Brothers, Inc. Email: basch@lehman.com, basch@mit.edu
101 Hudson St., 33rd Floor Fax: +1-201-524-5828
Jersey City, NJ 07302-3988 Voice: +1-201-524-5049
