[Xen-devel] Re: [RFC][PATCH] Secure XML-RPC for Xend

[Anthony Liguori <aliguori@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Ewan Mellor wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 08, 2006 at 09:13:17PM -0500, Anthony Liguori wrote:
>
>   
> > Hi,
> >
> > The following patch implements a secure XML-RPC protocol for Xend.  
> > Instead of using HTTPS with basic authentication and dealing with all 
> > that nasty OpenSSL/PAM integration, it just uses SSH.  This gives you 
> > all the properties you want (great security and PAM integration) with 
> > very little code.
> > There are some minor issues so I'd rather it not be applied 
> > immediately.  I'd like to get some feedback from people as to whether 
> > this approach is reasonable.  A user-facing change is that now you can 
> > use the XM_SERVER environmental variable to specific an XML-RPC URI.
> >     
> I'm with Ian -- I'd rather see the SSL/PAM solution done properly than this.
> That said, I don't see why we can't have this transport as well -- it's not a
> big patch.
>
> What happens if SSH isn't installed?  I don't see any nice diagnostic of that,
> so I'm guessing that it just splats out an "execv failed" exception (unless
> I've missed something).
>   
In the current code, Popen throws an OSError.

I really don't like catching exceptions and doing an sys.exit within the 
command handler.  I'd rather introduce a new exception type for use in 
xm and rethrow the OSError with a friendly message.  This will make 
localization quite a bit easier.
What do you think of this?

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

> Ewan.
>   

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