1st release of an LSA authentication package

[Corinna Vinschen]

On Nov 27 10:02, Igor Peshansky wrote:
> On Mon, 27 Nov 2006, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> > - Yes.  LSA authentication packages are loaded by LSASS.EXE at boot
> >   time.  Consequentially it's impossible to replace the DLL without
> >   rebooting the machine.  Which means, everybody having registered the
> >   Cygwin LSA auth package will always have to reboot after installing a
> >   new Cygwin DLL version.  However, the cyglsa DLL is bound to the
> >   Cygwin version it's shipped with, so LSA authentication will fail
> >   until the machine has been rebooted.
> 
> This is making me quite uncomfortable.  I really don't want to have to
> reboot every time I update Cygwin (especially since there is no easy way

That doesn't happen that often, does it?  We have usually months between
releases, so I don't quite see the problem.

> to detect from setup.exe that a reboot is needed if all Cygwin processes
> are stopped).  Would it be enough to just restart the "Net Logon" service?
> Can this be done in the lsa/cygwin postinstall script?

No.  The whole idea of registering and rebooting is to load the DLL
at boot time and not to allow to replace it at runtime easily.  The
Netlogon serive only provides pass through authentication in domain
environments and is not even started on standalone workstations or
servers.

What I'm doing right now is to rename the old DLL to, say, cyglsa.dll.X,
then copy the new DLL to /bin, then reboot.  A postinstall script would
only be helpful if the DLLs in the cygwin package are either named
differently or being shipped in another direcotry, and then a rename/copy
operation is done in the postinstall script.  However, this does not
remove the requirement to reboot.  I think it's rather more useful to
let Setup.exe do the job (by utilizing the PendingFileRenameOperations
registry key) and actually *inform* the user that rebooting is required,
than to do this in a postinstall script which runs invisibly.

Does Setup.exe support immediate rebooting btw?  If not, that would
not be very hard to add.  Other setup utilities do it, too.

> I'll investigate the above when I can get my machine into a rebootable
> state...  Makes me wish I were running VMware...

You know that VMware Server is available as free download, don't you?

http://www.vmware.com/products/server/


Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Project Co-Leader          cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat