Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] TEST RELEASE: Cygwin 1.7.34-003 (Christmas/New Year release)

[Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin at cygwin dot com>]

On Dec 20 19:19, Achim Gratz wrote:
> Corinna Vinschen writes:
> > The major change in this new release will be the new method to read
> > account (passwd and group) information from the Windows user databases
> > directly, without the requirement to generate /etc/passwd and /etc/group
> > files to generate Unix-like uid and gid.
> 
> I've just set up a box with Win8.1 Core as a build machine.  I've used
> the SAM desc schema and removed /etc/passwd and /etc/group and it works
> great.
> 
> 
> Here's one thing I still think warrants some improvement (in an AD
> environment, at least):
> 
> Previously I've always used /etc/fstab.d/<user> for mounting the users'
> home directory onto /home/<usr>.  That worked except for login via ssh
> publickey since at the time ssh checks for the authorized keys that
> mount isn't set up yet.  So I've copied those files into a different
> directory and told sshd to look there, which means I had to set up each
> user manually on the server.  I could now replace that mapping via AD,

No, you couldn't.  The cygwinFstab attribute exists in the schema,
but the functionality isn't implemented yet (and won't be for a while).

> but that would produce some rather unwieldy and long paths for certain
> users.  So, instead of specifying the users' home directory directly I
> would like to mount or auto-mount /home/<user> to the actual (network)
> home directory.

Hmm.  That's tricky.  There's no automatism for that yet.  Nsswitch.conf
only describes how to create the passwd entry for a user.  It does not
add any mechanism to run at user context switch.  And not everybody
would like to have something like that so it needs configuration.

I'm not opposed to stuff like that if it simplifies admin's job, but on
one hand we should evaluate first if there's a way to script that,
rather than to hardcode it into the Cygwin DLL, and on the other hand
it's not something I'd like to add for the first cut of 1.7.34...

> Another thing is that the Cygwin home directory is always a
> sub-directory of the windows home in our environment, so it would be
> useful if there was a placeholder for the windows home directory (%H or
> some such) for the /path override or even the schema entries to use.

Not unreasonable but tricky.  %H would be an absolute path which
collides with the current implementation in terms of the leading slash.
Hmm.

> > For your convenience I wrote new documentation.  Since this is a TEST
> > prerelease, the new documentation is not part of the official docs yet.
> > Rather have a look at
> >
> >   https://cygwin.com/preliminary-ntsec.html
> 
> > - When spawning a process under another user account, merge the user's
> >   default Windows environment into the new process' environment.
> 
> I think this change pulls in additional environment variables with
> windows path components when starting programs via cygserver/sshd that
> are not a login shell (and perhaps when the user's login shell isn't
> bash, so that profile doesn't get run), most notably PATH, TMP and TEMP.
> If these variables are used later on by programs expecting a POSIX path
> there, then things break.

Did you try it?  The idea was that these variables are converted to POSIX
on the way in...


Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Maintainer                 cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat

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