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Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2002 09:55:20 +0100
From: Corinna Vinschen <cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: Setting up user mode cron
Message-ID: <20020111095520.S12057@cygbert.vinschen.de>
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References: <3C3DE147 DOT 7070206 AT Salira DOT com>
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On Thu, Jan 10, 2002 at 10:45:27AM -0800, Andrew DeFaria wrote:
> limits" to cron. IOW I guess what I'm saying is that *something* should 
> be done (I know you can see this as whining and perhaps it is. But it's 
> whining for a good cause! :-)

So, why aren't you going to roll up your sleeves and create a
really useful patch?  That's better than whining, I think.

> This cron seems to support setting a MAILTO environment variable to tell 
> cron where to mail output in case of errors. Could it not simply 
> additionally support USERNAME and PASSWD environment variables that, if 
> present in the crontab would cause cron to change user context with 
> asking for logon credentials? Of course of concern would be the possibly 
> cleartext PASSWD. Perhaps PASSWD could be required to be encrypted like 
> that usually in bona fide Unix /etc/passwd (/etc/shadow) files. It's 
> just a thought of a possible workaround to a possibly bad situation.

You can't encrypt the passwd as in UNIX.  These are asymmetrically
encryptions.  You can't get the original passwd back.  Your proposition
would need a symmetrically encrypted password which means, the
encryption key is either hardcoded in cron (URGH) or it's evaluated
by some deterministical function (urgh).  And you would of course
need an extra tool to create the encrypted from the cleartext password
to allow a user to type it into his/her crontab file.

Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Developer                                mailto:cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat, Inc.

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