Historically NSS has offered little support for sharing databases
between applications. The Netscape servers worked around this by giving
each application its own databases; they were not shared across the
machine. If you look at the project plan for the next release of NSS
(http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/pki/nss/nss-3.4/nss-3.4-plan.html),
you will see "Multiple client applications share the same cert and key
databases" on the list of OUT features :(

You seem to envision NSS as a shared runtime facility. We've always seen
it as a set of developer tools. There's nothing to prevent you from
installing the libraries and JAR file in a central, shared location, but
each application will have to have its own set of databases.

Steven T. Hatton wrote:

 > If I understand correctly, one main purpose of NSS is to provide a
 > standard 'wrapper' around different implementations of security tokens
 > and security services, so the programmer using the services can write
 > to one abstract interface which will provide all the services from the
 > underlying token implementation.  JSS is inturn, a wrapper around NSS
 > which provides the Java programmer with the same functionality NSS
 > provides to the C programmer.
 >
 > I am aware of things such as JSSE and OpenSSL which provide much of
 > the functionality I am looking for.  The problem I ran into was that
 > of incompatible certificate/key-store formats.  In particular, I
 > wanted to have one cert issued per box which would provide for SSL/PKI
 > related services for all servers running on the box.  In order to use
 > JSSE I was  required to export the keys and certificates and store
 > them in a different format.  This, to me is a non-starter.  Anything
 > which required the same data to be stored in different locations, and
 > or different formats - with the exception of caching and backup
 > purposes - is inherently evil.
 >
 > What I want is the ability to the following:
 >
 > ftp -a ftp.mozilla.org/<where the latest JSS is>
 > tar xvfz latest-jss.tar.gz
 > pkgadd -d latest-jss //or rpm -i latest-jss
 >
 > /* hack a bunch of java code that uses JSS
 >    create and install one set of key3.db, cert7.db and secmod.db files
 > for all my aplications on a given box.
 > */
 >
 > run my code.
 >
 > The ease of installation is extremely important.  Am I off target in
 > what I am wanting?
 >
 > Steven
 >



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