Proposed new FreeTDS configuration format

Steve Langasek vorlon at netexpress.net
Tue May 29 21:27:59 EDT 2001


On Tue, 29 May 2001, Brian Bruns wrote:

> On Wed, 30 May 2001, James Cameron wrote:

> > Great!  Is any of your work likely to be applicable to the issue of
> > Mozilla or other web browsers not being able to perform NTLM
> > authentication?

> Dunno, it looks like MS uses essential the same method for all their
> products, I've looked at SMB, telnet (via a CERT advisory lambasting them
> for doing it), and the SQL stuff.  They're in different wrappers but
> basically the data.  I'm doing only NTLMSSP right now, the v2 stuff looks
> fairly simple as well (uses a standard MD4 hash instead, and is a bit more
> secure). If someone shows up needing it, we should be able to support it,
> but everything I've seen is the older hash.

I was quite pleased to hear you were using OpenSSL for the NTLMSSP hashing in
FreeTDS, for precisely this reason.  I didn't realize OpenSSL had routines
that would be useful as a shortcut, but given that it does, it should be
little trouble to adapt Brian's work for use in other projects -- especially
since so many browsers, webservers, etc. already depend on OpenSSL.

> > I reviewed the proposed configuration file.  It is straightforward, and
> > I understood it quickly.

> > Minor nit.  I'm not sure "[global]" is the best name for default
> > settings ... (a) FreeTDS may be used in space ;-), (b) it prevents the
> > use of a database with that name, (c) "[]", "[*]" or "[defaults]" mean
> > more to me.

> [defaults] it is.  anyone who named their database defaults is SOL ;-)  My
> concern is that [] isn't very obvious as to its function, and we can't
> very well have a config setting to determine the section name, now can we?
> [global] is what samba uses, so I suppose you can't have a samba share
> named 'global' either...hmmm...

The use of [global] was obvious to me, but I do have a bit of a Samba bias. ;)

And you can have a share named 'global', you just can't introduce it using a
heading of [global]. (conf file variable substitution is such fun... :)

Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer




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