[ale] Ports and Crypt

[Lex Spoon]

One option, for the terminally lazy, would be to use rsh and forget
about writing the networking and security code yourself.  Instead, you
could write a program that prints the desired information to stdout,
and when people on other machines wanted to access it, they would
type:

    rsh host dumpstats


As an added bonus, whenever someone fixes a bug in rsh, you can
immediately take advantage of it; furthermore, you can even replace it
with ssh to get encryption.

On the downside, the users have to know the name of each thing they
want to see info about.  Writing a

    rsh host help

sort of thing would help.  Another downside is that you are forced to
use the system passwd file, so you can't have any "guest" passwords or
anything like that.  Another is (I think) that rsh isn't interactive.

But it IS easier to code up :)


lex





> Ok,
>   I'm thinking of doing some port based stuff on my machine, such as 
> telnet to port 4133 and get a rather detailed report of what's going on
> with the machine.  The problem is I'm paranoid by default.  I'd like to
> use /etc/passwd to restrict who can/can't access it.  I've got down
> alot of the details.  My problem is I want to use a perl script and a
> subroutine that requests a passwd then compares it agains an entry
> in /etc/passwd.  Does anyone have a quick tutorial on how to encrypt
> the string the user gives so I can do a comparison or some other 
> good ideas?
> 
> Robert