[HECnet] Anonymous FAL (Tops-20)

Tops-20 is vastly different from Unix (and I believe also VMS) as to how it manages user ids and accounts.? Parts of the authentication paradigm are very tightly woven into the the file system.? Briefly, * A user id is a login-able directory (I.E., one that doesn't have a password and is not set FILES-ONLY).? In addition to basic OS restrictions which prevent you from viewing file system meta-data unless you have appropriate authorization, an access control job (ACJ) is layered on top of this which can even restrict privileged users. * Accounts are either validated out of a binary accounting file in monitor space (which is compiled from ASCII source) or via the ACJ. Accounts can have multiple users or systems processes (such as spoolers) creating billing records. Users can switch between accounts on a per-job, per-fork and intra-program basis (a program can decide to bill certain portions of its activity to different accounts). * The obvious benefit is that there is no password file to attack or steal and you can't even tell that there is an accounting file; probing passwords is monitored and a certain amount of intervention is done.? It is /extremely/ fast. No /etc/passwd to grovel. However, a deleterious side-effect is that once an id is created, it can be used for _anything_, including online interactive login. On a PANDA monitor, is possible to specify a user id as FTP-ONLY, but neither the supplied 5 series ACJ nor the EXEC do anything with it. Historically, the Tops-20 FTP server implemented ANONYMOUS usage by parsing for the login user atom ANONYMOUS and then swallowing anything for the password (what was typically supplied was an email addresses). This was then hardwired into a local id. Artifacts of this still exist in certain browers.? Guess who supplies IEUSER@ as the email address password for ANONYOUS usage? I recall that this is the approach that we had to use with Tops-20 FAL. The Extended? Mode FTP server that I wrote is configurable via a file to specify the underlying id and password.? More productization would probably including having the ACJ enforce FTP-ONLY on LOGIN% or CRJOB% and having the EXEC parse for and display FTP-ONLY.? Probably about two weeks' part time work as I recall.? Might have to consider Batch policy. One approach here could be to lift the ANONYMOUS code out of EFTPSR and drop it into FAL and then do the changes to the ACJ and EXEC. I'm just surprised none of the HECnet Tops-10 or Tops-20 nerds have done it (there is some commonality in some of the sources). Since Tops-20 has a BLISS compiler which implements BLISS COMMON (my first training at DEC as an employee was to write code that would cross compile under VMS, RSX, Tops-10 and Tops-20).? I think it might be useful to review some of the VMS DECnet source, if any of that is available.? It might be possible to lift some functionality, which could be fun. Does the VMS hobbiest license get you source code? > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > On 7/3/2019 7:21 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote: > > VMS, as someone else mentioned, have a default account for FAL. > > RSX does not have that.? However, you can use proxy access in RSX to > achieve something similar.? Enable incoming and outgoing proxy, and > define a default account that incoming requests should be using that way. > > If TOPS-20 can do this I don't know.? But it's a suggestion for > something else/more to check. > > ? Johnny >> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ >> On 2019-07-03 14:15, Thomas DeBellis wrote: >> >> I have some software that I'd like to post, but don't recall how to >> configure FAL to allow for an anonymous connection; to download from >> a restricted directory. >> >> I know how to do it for the FTP server (seeing as I wrote it), but >> ... different code base. >> >> I can only vaguely remember what we did for CCnet at Columbia >> University in the 1980's, but I think it was kind of a hack.