initial observations of sfs 0.7.2 (on NetBSD)

Hi.

After reading a paper in ";login" about SFS, I decided to evalute it
for use, especially as a replacement for running NFS over IPsec
to secure file system access over my 802.11b links (since IPsec is
too damn complex and fragile, especially with racoon).

Here's my initial impressions:

    *   The original NetBSD package (equivalent to a FreeBSD or
        OpenBSD `port') needed some tweaks.  This is more of an
        internal NetBSD "housekeeping" issue, and I've already
        fixed them.


    *   rex seems too verbose, even without "-v".
        E.g, without "-v" I wouldnt' expect the first two lines:

        lukem@odysseus 5> rex home date
        rex: Prepending '@' to destination `home' and attempting SRP
        rex: Connecting to @home.mewburn.net,u6cycsked6crm5m5pk3dwuyrvta8gmvq
        Tue Mar 25 04:42:10 EST 2003

        
        lukem@odysseus 6> rex -v home date
        rex: Prepending '@' to destination `home' and attempting SRP
        rex: Contacting existing agent...
        rex: fetching key via SRP: lukem@home
        rex: SRP cache lookup in agent succeeded: 
@home.mewburn.net,u6cycsked6crm5m5pk3dwuyrvta8gmvq
        rex: Connecting to @home.mewburn.net,u6cycsked6crm5m5pk3dwuyrvta8gmvq
        rex: attached
        rex: made channel: listen -x 
        rex: got xauth info
        rex: made channel: /usr/X11R6/bin/xauth 
        rex: made channel: . -c date 
        Tue Mar 25 04:42:15 EST 2003


    *   I'm probably missing something, but it seems that when
        I "sfs login" to setup my session, I still need to
        type in my passphrase for the first rex connection as well.


    *   sfsagent is way too verbose, and has the annoying habit of
        spamming the tty that you ran "sfskey login" on with various
        diagnostic messages.


    *   ptyd isn't shutdown when you shutdown sfssd.
        If you restart sfssd, you'll get log messages like:
            rexd: spawning /usr/pkg/lib/sfs-0.7.2/ptyd 
            ptyd: fatal: /var/sfs/sockets/ptyd.sock: Address already in use 
        Is there any particular reason that ptyd isn't shutdown when
        rexd is?


    *   There's no man page for rexd(8) yet, so I had to RTFS to work out
        why my override of the hostname in sfsauthd_config and
        sfsrwcd_config wasn't working for rex connections.
        After a bit of digging through the source and some trial &
        error, I found that changing sfssd_config from
                Service 3 rexd
        to
                Service 3 rexd -h specific.host.name
        was the solution.  Maybe a commented-out entry in the sample
        sfssd_config, and references in the other man pages until we
        have one for rexd(8), would suffice?


    *   To simplify the first startup of sfssd, the NetBSD rc.d script
        for sfssd has the ability to generate the hostkey.
        Currently it just uses
                sfskey gen -P /usr/pkg/etc/sfs/sfs_host_key
        but this requires interactive interaction, which isn't
        acceptable incase this runs at system startup.

        I have a local change to add '-K -l sfs_host_key'
        to prevent sfskey asking questions, except that I'm not
        sure of the implications of using '-K' like that.
        "Help!"


    *   Other than these minor issues, so far SFS is looking pretty slick.
        Good work!


(If these have been convered before, my apologies.  I tried to quickly
check the web-based mailing list archives, but they're a bit hard to 
wade through for anything serious).


Thanks,
Luke.