[jcifs] Linux and Windows

[Michael B. Allen]

On Tue, 25 Mar 2003 12:02:38 -0600
"Tyrrell, James" <JTyrrell at AEGONUSA.com> wrote:

> That would be great and something that I think this great package needs.  We
> all live in this corporate world where windows is everywhere, but I hate to
> tie something so completely to windows and IE that nothing else works and in
> fact sometimes when I hit the server it appears to lock up if I get at it
> (the site) from a browser that is not supported.  I have not really gotten
> that nailed down just yet.

I am not comfortable adding plain text authentication to this package. It
might solve your problem but it is a blatant security risk to pass NT
passwords in plain text.

The real solution here is to stick with the method selected and enable
Mozilla to negotiate NTLM password authentication. Unfortunately,
last I heard, there is a bug in Mozilla's that has to do with reissuing
requests over *the same* connection. Mozilla is not incorrect to close
and reissue requests on a new connect. In fact NTLM HTTP authentication
is non-standard in this respect. So those two facts have not compelled
the Mozilla folks to incorporate this functionality. Still, I think this
is really a Mozilla problem. It's certaintly not a jCIFS problem! :~)

See Mozilla bug reports:

  http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23679

Also the below describes a patch that implements some kind of Windows
passwordless authentication however it's not clear to me what it does
exactly:

  http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=159015

Quite a few people have had their hands in this problem. If you look
closely even Andrew Bartlett from Samba is involved.

Mike

-- 
A  program should be written to model the concepts of the task it
performs rather than the physical world or a process because this
maximizes  the  potential  for it to be applied to tasks that are
conceptually  similar and, more important, to tasks that have not
yet been conceived.