Subject: Checking access files

From: Kent Landfield <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Apr 1997 12:11:51 -0500 (CDT)

# Currently (as of B12) the way that wu-ftpd reads the config files is a mess...
# it's a good idea, but if you make a spelling mistake in the config file,
# it just gets ignored. This could be fixed by creating some kind of list
# of valid tags (so at least the first entry, such as "class" or "message"
# would be checked)...

While I don't like the way things can be ignored, I'm hesitant to load up
the server with error checking that has to be done on every connect.  That
could be a bit of a performance problem....

What would make sense though is to put that kind of checking in a program 
outside the server.  If ckconfig were expanded to be smart about file formats 
and did serious checking then an administrator could check the formats after 
any changes.   If the admin didn't use it to verify the syntax, well, that's 
their problem.  

Does this make sense to others ?  If so I'll play with ckconfig a bit. 
(The name conflicts with another ckconfig program on the net but that's 
another issue... ;-))

-- 
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---

From: Bob Luckin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Apr 97 13:36:03 CDT

Kent said :-
[Re checking commands in the ftpaccess config file...]
> (The name conflicts with another ckconfig program on the net but that's 

While I suspect that the overhead for syntaxing the command file would not
really be all that significant, it does bring up the issue of how the daemon
would respond if it found a problem...  Not much use telling the client, as
they don't have any control over the file in the first place - nor would
they be expecting any feedback of this sort.

And I do agree that syntaxing the file everytime the server is started should
not be necessary, whatever the overhead - it shouldn't change often, so the
process you've suggested or running ckconfig to check the syntax immediately
after it has been changed makes a great deal of sense.

I think the suggestion is a good idea.  You could do this in ckconfig, or
perhaps in separate program, since you probably don't need to check the
rest of the configuration every time you make a simple change to the
ftpaccess file.  (Or this could be a command line switch to ckconfig.
Whatever.)

Cheers, Bob