Thank you for such a complete answer. At this point, I don't think that
it is worth it to our team to develop such a solution since theres only
going to be around 10 users that will be logging in and they are all
sysadmins and developers. However, if we do end up using such a solution
in the future, we'll make sure to get the results back to you!

Zakir
 

-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Duncan McGreggor
Sent: Tuesday, December 05, 2006 11:19 PM
To: General discussion of using zenoss system
Subject: Re: [zenoss-users] External Authentication


On Dec 5, 2006, at 8:32 PM, Durumeric, Zakir B wrote:

> Has anybody worked on using external authentication with Zenoss, 
> against basic unix logins, PAM or kerberos? Or is this more of a Zope 
> question than a Zenoss question?

Zenoss uses PAS (PluggableAuthService).

Short answer: currently there is no support for authentication against
PAM or Kerberos. There are PAS plugins for LDAP, however (with reports
of working against MS AD).

Here's the long answer:

PAS is software that abstracts most authentication workflow into
separate plugins. In essence, this provides an "easy" means of writing
authenticating plugins against anything that has python libs (or that
you can create python libs for). There's a quick intro to this topic
here:
   http://plone.org/documentation/tutorial/borg/writing-a-custom-pas-
plug-in

I just found a plugin for Sun's Access Manager here:
   https://pluto.objectrealms.net/svn/public/pasplugins/samagentauth/
trunk

And another for (what looks like) authenticating against a SQL source:
   https://dev.serverzen.com/svn/public/projects/SQLPASPlugin/trunk/

I could find nothing for PAM or Kerberos with PAS.

I happen to know (personally) the guy that originally sponsored the
python PAM code. He had one of his employees write it, but that guy has
long-since left the company. It is not currently maintained.  
However, python 2.5 has the 'spwd' module, and this would be a better
approach:
   http://docs.python.org/lib/module-spwd.html

It looks like there is some recent work on a python module for using
Kerberos from Python
   https://launchpad.net/people/bmontgom/+branch/+junk/python-krb5
   http://www.montynet.org/bzr/python-krb5/

With python 2.5, it would be fairly easy for a python programmer
familiar with PAS to to write a PAS plugin for authenticating against
the UNIX shadow passwd file. Depending on how stable/solid the python
code for Kerberos is, as PAS plugin for Kereros would also be in the
realm of possibility.

It is my understanding that Zenoss has not received much of a demand for
this level of functionality. However, if you do end up writing a
Kerberos or spwd PAS plugin, we'd be delighted to review it and possibly
include it in a future release. Conversely, if you don't have the time
and this is very important to you, I'm sure you could contract for
plugin development.

d
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