Subject: [LON-CAPA-dev] Hung lond

From: Gerd Kortemeyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2002 18:09:09 -0500

We had a hung lond child on Thursday night.

Good news #1) The new check-up mechanism caught the unresponsive child
and replaced it.

Good news #2) Like last time, the child got hung on an authentication
call. This time, we had the logs record the submitted values. It turns
out that the submitted password was five Null-bytes. Apparently, the
Kerberos authentication routines got hung up on that "password," and
that is why lond stopped responding.

The submission of the null bytes could have been produced by
"Konqueror", a currently unsupported browser for LON-CAPA.

lond has been changed to return "non_authorized" if the password
contains a null byte, and not call Kerberos.

It would be great if somebody who has access to Konqueror could try with
the old lond ON A DEVELOPMENT MACHINE if this indeed hangs lond, and
then see if the new lond solves the problem. If verified, this should be
moved to "STABLE" asap, since - if known to the students - this would be
a great way to avoid homework.

---

From: Scott Harrison <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2002 18:20:50 -0500

> a great way to avoid homework.

http://mail.lon-capa.org/mailman/listinfo/lon-capa-dev
is publicly viewable.

The solution to security is, of course, in the long term
not secrecy.

However, I continually freak out about somebody somehow
cracking one or more of the "100%" up-to-date installations,
despite a pretty good security design.

I suppose that if machines are just simply hung, then the security
issues are not immense.  So maybe I'm just proposing common sense
about when to/when not to discuss things on the listserv.

Additionally, we could make lon-capa-dev only viewable to members
which may/may not be advisable for a variety of reasons I imagine.

Regards,
Scott

---

From: Felicia Berryman <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2002 10:16:54 -0500

Hi Scott,

Guy asked that all lists be publically accessible on the web at one of
our Tuesday meetings.  He explained to me that her prefers to keep
things as open as possible until there is a problem and I agreed with
him.  The code is open source, I don't see why discussing the code
should be in private - just my opinion.  Please reply to Guy if you have
further difficulties with this.  If Guy tells me to change the settings,
then I will.

Felicia

Scott Harrison wrote:
> _______________________________________________
> LON-CAPA-dev mailing list
> [email-masked]

--
Felicia Berryman
LON-CAPA Coordinator
Michigan State University
  Email:  [email-masked]
  Phone:  (517)432-9866  
http://www.lon-capa.org

---

From: Scott Harrison <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2002 10:34:52 -0500

Dear All:

> him.  

I do not care about preferences.  I care about reasonable
solutions.

> The code is open source, I don't see why discussing the code
> should be in private - just my opinion.

Again, the reason that I mentioned was that of security.

> Please reply to Guy if you have
> further difficulties with this. 

Again, I like things being open, so where's the difficulty here?

THIS IS AN OPEN SOURCE PROJECT AND DECISIONS WILL BE MADE BY REASONABLE
DISCUSSION AND NOT BY ANY OTHER METHOD.

Everyone should feel free to reply to me if anyone would
like to discuss anything about this relatively minor issue
or anything else.

But don't ever tell me that something has to be a certain
way because so and so said so.

Regards,
Scott

-- 
Scott Harrison -- Graduate Student
Microbiology and Molecular Genetics
Mich. State. Univ., East Lansing, MI
[email-masked], 517-353-0998

---

From: Guy Albertelli II <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2002 15:13:23 -0500 (EST)

Hi Gerd,

Some more data for it.

As we know this was the last call before bombing:
Thu Feb  7 19:10:08 2002 (16655): Processing msua2: enc:36:96664552f0a1aaf3a82f8b0c5f02955b02aef832f45ad2806a2e6343956f1dd7521ec2cd12c43881
Thu Feb  7 19:10:08 2002 (16655): Decrypted msua2: auth:msu:skaricha:%00%00%00%00%00%00
Thu Feb  7 19:10:33 2002 (16643): Child 16655 did not respond
Thu Feb  7 19:10:33 2002 (16643): Child 16655 died

Testing things out:
Wed Feb 13 15:06:01 2002 (22651): Processing msua4: enc:42:e64403eec5e0a67bb5791494132bfac561507e4b4680141877d7b07f7863b8c41be2e7a8660bcaa9e42adf05b8b327b6
Wed Feb 13 15:06:01 2002 (22651): Decrypted msua4: auth:msu:albertel:%00%00%00%00%00%00%00%00
Wed Feb 13 15:06:01 2002 (22651): Completed auth:msu:albertel:%00%00%00%00%00%00%00%00 Listening to msua4
Wed Feb 13 15:07:37 2002 (22651): Processing msua4: enc:33:e64403eec5e0a67bb5791494132bfac561507e4b4680141877d7b07f7863b8c452ebe8692f246911
Wed Feb 13 15:07:37 2002 (22651): Decrypted msua4: auth:msu:albertel:%00%00%00%00%00
Wed Feb 13 15:07:37 2002 (22651): Completed auth:msu:albertel:%00%00%00%00%00 Listening to msua4

So looks like that is a miss.
-- 
[email-masked]        BM: n^20 t20 z20 qS 
Guy Albertelli -7-9-8-  O-
    I would love to but . . . it wouldn't be fair to the other Beautiful
    People.