Some Small Hacks

For lack of a better place to put these, I've come up with a listing directory of small hacks that I've made to various things. These are not generally production quality, and mostly comprise modifications that I've made to NetBSD for use in my environment.

This repository is neither versioned, nor guaranteed to be at all stable. It is more of a resting place for patches that I am working on that I feel other people might be able to use. Once I finish them, they will be removed and put in a more appropriate place---such as the distribution of the software that they are patching.

I am also using this page as a solicitation for comments on code, before I submit it for inclusion elsewhere. If you find anything here useful and especially if you find bugs, please send email to elric@imrryr.org.

Kerberos

NetBSD uses Heimdal rather than MIT Kerberos 5 and there are some subtle differences in the APIs. I've modified a couple of X programs to work properly with the version of Heimdal shipped in NetBSD for use in my environment.

xdm: So, one of the problems with xdm is that it doesn't support krb5 authentication out of the box. This is a slightly patched up version which does. You'll have to also make two changes to the code in xc/config/cf, which are contained in this patch. This code will probably only work with Heimdal and has only been tested on NetBSD and XFree86 4.2.0.
xlockmore: This is a NetBSD pkgsrc tarball containing only the pkg for xlockmore. Just unpack it and cp it into your pkgsrc tree and build it. It should allow you to use your krb5 passwords to unlock your screen. You can also choose to install xlock without the setuid bit, if you are not using local passwords.

Hesiod

I've been looking at Hesiod a little bit, and the most glaring problem that I've found is that [unlike YP] there are no automated tools to generate the databases. Of course, the lack of existing documentation also proves to be an issue---but I haven't had a chance to deal with that.

mkhesdb: This is a very simple program that uses get*ent() to iterate over local databases and outputs a large hesiod database. I made an attempt to make a database which is compatible with the examples provided in ``The Hesiod Name Server'' by Stephen P. Dyer. There are also some options to enable Ultrix-compatibility which I got from talking to people that run Ultrix. The code includes a man page, which is provided out here for reference.