Re: A Few Ideas

[Todd Graham Lewis <tlewis mindspring net>]

On Thu, 17 Sep 1998, Jeff Ronne wrote:

> [Feel free to cc or forward any part of this thread to the list, I meant 
> to send my original to the list, but I wasn't paying attention.]

Am doing so.

> On Fri, Sep 18, 1998 at 01:11:16AM -0400, Todd Graham Lewis wrote:
> > On Thu, 17 Sep 1998, Jeff Ronne wrote:
> > 
> > > Or you could use the XAUTHORITY environmental variable.
> >
> > Except that passing secret information around in environ's is poor,
> > since they may or may not be globally visible depending on the unix.
> 
> It doesn't leak anything hazardous.  You just set
> export XAUTHORITY=$HOME/.Xauthority
> No sensitive information goes in XAUTHORITY.

Woops!  You are right; sorry about that.

Of course, if you are using kerb5 authentication, then none of this
will work in any way which I can tell.  You would have to set up an
.Xauthority file, authorize that shared secret, and then pass it on to
your root instance.

Of course, kerberos is horribly broken in the X code, so no one is probably
going to use it any time soon.

--
Todd Graham Lewis            32°49'N,83°36'W          (800) 719-4664, x2804
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