[HECnet] PyDECnet File Transfer Support?

[Paul Koning]

> On Dec 22, 2021, at 4:40 PM, Robert Armstrong <bob at jfcl.com> wrote:
> 
>> Paul Koning [paulkoning at comcast.net] wrote:
>>> On Dec 22, 2021, at 2:55 PM, Mark J. Blair <nf6x at nf6x.net> wrote:
>>> Are there any thoughts about adding file transfer capabilities to
> PyDECnet ...
>> 
>> Yes, I'm planning to do that at some point.  
> 
>  Please give us (pyDECnet users) a way to disable it - pyDECnet runs as
> root and I'm not really comfortable having it become a program that can
> remotely read or write files on my system.
> 
> Bob

Definitely.  It will be just another DECnet object, and while there are several that come enabled by default in PyDECnet, you can disable any of them if you don't want them.  See doc/config.txt.  For example, if you don't want people to have read access via NCP to your node's status information, disable object 19.  Or set its "verification" to "on", in that case it only works if you give it a valid username/password defined on your host.

For FAL I intend to make it actually log in using the supplied access control info, so if you give your credentials it would use your UID/GID.  And if you allow guest access, it would use whatever UID/GID is set up for that purpose, similar to FTP with guest access.

Apart from the protocol itself, this depends on a not yet existing feature, the ability to start a subprocess and switch it to another UID.  I believe I know how to do that but haven't yet.

	paul