Re: [Gnu-arch-users] RFC: arch protocol, smart server, and tla implementation prototypes

[Scott Parish]

On Thu, Jan 29, 2004 at 06:34:55PM -0500, Colin Walters wrote:

> I've been working on a "smart server" over the past few days.

Good to hear that somebody's still working on such.

I was thinking about this some last week; i've completely given up on
the smart server as a cgi concept--it would work, but its too much
of a hackish mess. Having discarded that, and not really wanting to
completely start from scratch on a whole new lead me to the idea of
creating an ssh subsystem that would be a smart server. One could either
take and largely extend the existing sftp subsystem, or start from
scratch. It seems that this would be a very clean, as well as secure
approach.

A few random things that i've long desired to go into a decent protocol:

  + ability to redirect "anonymous" clients.

    It would be nice to redirect everybody, redirecting those
    using password auth is probably not the right thing to do.
    (challenge/response auth should be fine though)

  + protocol negotiation

    I'd like to see a command in the protocol that identifies which
    commands the server supports. This way a smart client could figure
    out just how smart a given server is and act accordingly, and we
    wouldn't have to force the whole world to upgrade at the same time.
    Additionally it could be nice if individual protocol commands were
    versioned. This could easily be achieved by having a required
    protocol command "capabilities" (or something) that would return a
    table of a| command name, b| command version.

sRp

-- 
Scott Parish
http://srparish.net/

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