Interactive Rsync Authentication Problem

[Andrew Klein]

I believe J.W. Schultz replied to this but I lost it since 
I was not yet fully subscribed to the list. He rightly suggested 
that the a portable getpass() would be non-trivial.  An alternate
suggestion though:  Solaris has a getpassphrase() call that 
returns up to 256 chars.  The configure script could check if 
the function exists and do an appropriate #define.  Then authenticate.c
can be made a bit be smarter in a generally portable way.


Andrew Klein wrote:

> I have run across an interesting issue when running rsync from Solaris 
> to an rsync daemon on Linux.  It works properly when I specify the 
> password on the command line:
>
>RSYNC_PASSWORD=the_Password rsync -r /tmp/test test_user at test_server::test_user/topdir/subdir
>
> However, if I do not specify the password on the command line and am 
> prompted interactively, it always fails. After some investigation I 
> find that Solaris getpass() returns a maximum of PASS_MAX bytes which 
> on our systems is set to 8.  The comment in authenticate.c is:
>
>     cyeoh says that getpass is deprecated, because
>     it may return a truncated password on some systems,
>     and it is not in the LSB.
>
> Does this issue deserve a code fix/workaround?
>
> Andy Klein
>