Subject: Krb5 admin protocol

From: Wyllys Ingersoll <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2001 15:18:39 -0500 (EST)

For documentation purposes, I have been looking for
any documents or pointers that describe the OpenVision
RPC protocol used by the MIT administration server and
clients.  Its not RPCSEC_GSS but it does do some
sort of secure RPC.  I would appreciate any pointers do
documentation in this area.

thanks,
  Wyllys Ingersoll

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From: Nicolas Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2001 16:11:19 -0500

There is only source code to document the OpenVision protocol, so far as
I know. There are some documents in the MIT source, but no RPC function
declarations... The .x RPC protocol declaration files have been lost, or
so I'm told, so you'll have to look at the XDR encoding/decoding
functions and the C functions they call in turn. Fortunately the source
code to all this is fairly well organized.

The RPC security mechanism used is not very important. OpenVision used
AUTH_GSSAPI, a mechanism they cooked on their own and on which Sun based
RPCSEC_GSS. Sun, incidentally, seems to have taken the MIT source and
used that for their KDC, including kadmin, though they dropped
AUTH_GSSAPI and added RPCSEC_GSS instead. MIT folk have intimated that
they want to move to RPCSEC_GSS at some point...

Look src/kadmin/server/ and src/lib/kadm5/srv/ in the MIT sources...

Nico

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