[665] in Zephyr_Bugs
Re: authorization failure (more information on this)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (ghudson@MIT.EDU)
Wed Jul 26 18:57:54 1995
From: ghudson@MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 18:57:42 -0400
To: Terry Hung <terryh@MAILBOX.SLAC.Stanford.EDU>
Cc: zephyr-bugs@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: "[663] in Zephyr_Bugs"
> My colleague reported that the "authorization failure" only occurs
> on "multi-homed" machine, one that has two connections to the
> network. In our case one connection is ethernet the other FDDI.
Yeah, the "authorization failure" is common on multi-homed or SLIP
machines. The error stems from the server checking the IP address of
the message against the IP address reported in the notice itself
(which is what zwgc uses to find the address). If the client machine
is unable to correctly determine the IP address that the host manager
will be using to send the message to the server (the library uses
gethostbyname() on the result of gethostname() to determine this),
then the server will reject the message. Unfortunately, since this IP
address is also part of the packet uid (a poor design decision made a
long time ago), it's not easy to simply substitute the correct
information on the server side.
If you want to disable the check (making it trivial to forge what
message you're sending a zephyrgram from), it's the last if statement
at the end of handle_packet() in sever/dispatch.c.
