On Fri, Jan 16, 2004 at 02:39:36PM -0600, Jason A. Pattie wrote:
> | Anyway, it looks like forgotten tokens... suspended, not shut down laptop?
> 
> Shutdown, of course.  Am I to understand that a token cannot be
> maintained across reboots/restarts of venus?  I.e., how is disconnected
> startup supposed to work if I can't shutdown my laptop, take it home,

Authentication tokens are not stored persistently, so they can not
survive a venus restart. But you can save a token to a file and pass it
to venus later on after a restart. Ofcourse saving a token to a file
could be a security risk for some people, but you could save it in an
encrypted partition, or on a removable flash device or something.

    clog -tofile codatokenfile user_at_realm
    clog -fromfile codatokenfile

I'm still considering adding some form of encryption (using the user's
password?) to the saved token so that it could possibly be left around
in a less secure location (publicly readable in /coda?) or could be
emailed around.

If you give a disconnected venus a token, it will allow access, but
has no way to tell whether the token is actually still usable. A token
is only discarded when a server actually rejects it. So you can use an
old (or fake) token while disconnected, but you cannot use it to
actually commit any changes to the server until you get a valid token.

> I guess if this is not possible that would explain why I cannot login to
> my coda HOME directory before I clog as my user to get a token.

Correct, I actually don't have $HOME in Coda, but many of the '.foo'
files and subdirectories are links into my Coda homedirectory. It allows
me to start and log in even if Coda is not running. And the /coda tree
cannot be unmounted (and thus venus can't be restarted) as long as any
process has their working directory somewhere in /coda.

Finally, I tend to just suspend my laptop all the time. Right now I have
only 5 days uptime, but only because I just booted into a new kernel.
My laptop can be suspended for several days without a problem and will
even do a suspend to disk if the battery is almost completely drained.
So in my case disconnected operation does get far more testing compared
to disconnected startup.

> Can I replicate the auth2 daemon on my laptop in order to facilitate
> retrieving a token when starting up disconnected?

The auth2 daemon really doesn't talk to anything. But I don't really see
this as a good solution because you would have to also run the
updateclnt to get the current user, password and shared secret files
from the server.

If you just want a token without network connectivity, use clog
-tofile/fromfile, if you want to be able to create an 'arbitrary token'
you can use 'tokentool' which I believe is installed on the server in
/usr/sbin and can create a token that can be used by clog -fromfile.

Jan