Testers needed: New passwd/group handling in Cygwin

[Corinna Vinschen]

On Feb 26 08:09, Achim Gratz wrote:
> > Sorry, I don't grok this.  What has a web application server to do with
> > asking a DC for user info?
> 
> We have one of these that does a lot of DC lookups because it authenticates
> all users.  It's also in a much faster network, so I can check there what
> the lookup rate could be reasonably expected to be.
> 
> > Erm... how often are you calling id, usually?
> 
> I'm currently doing this in the login process to figure out whether the
> prompt should show "root" powers.  I'll have to figure out something else to
> do instead.

No, you don't.  I'm actually doing the same.  Let's keep up with this
and try to make Cygwin faster in the first place.

> > Also, we're in the early
> > stages of testing this change.  The idea is not that you just switch,
> > the idea is that we *test* this and I get enough feedback to be able to
> > ease the biggest pains.
> 
> Understood.  Until now I had to generate passwd and group files and I was
> hoping that the need for doing that would go away (I'd also need to talk to
> our AD folks so they start populating the correct fields).

Yup.  Feedback from AD admins is greatly appreciated.

> > Other than that, I just had an in-shower inspiration how to speed up
> > `id' specificially.  The getgroups(2) call is in the center of this and
> > I could probably speed up the stuiff a lot by opening the LDAP
> > connection in getgroups only once. 
> 
> Thursday?  :-)

Hmm, probably.

> > Also, more radically, if we drop the functionality to define another
> > group name for a group, we could drop the requirement to open an LDAP
> > connection to fetch group information to the DC entirely(*).  This would
> > only affect domain groups, local groups could still have different
> > names.  But I'm already wondering for a couple of days if having a
> > Cygwin group name different from the Windows group name is really
> > necessary at all.  I added this years ago for fun, but there's no
> > serious reason I can think of which would require to keep up with this.
> > 
> > (*) Assuming the group info is cached in the local LSA, which is
> >     pretty likely for the groups of the current user.
> 
> That would also work for me (I don't think I've ever used that feature
> consciously).
> 
> > Sigh.  Testing in this tempo will take ages.
> 
> Sorry, but that's not my decision to make in this case.  I'll see if I can
> sneak in something until the end of the week.

That would be nice.  Especially since your mail was the last straw
which keeps me from having to do *shudder* more documentation.


Corinna

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