Subject: Server Modifications for alias expansion

From: Leif Sawyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Sep 1997 13:24:19 -0800

Hello,

Been watching the list for a while, but not much participation.

I have a question regarding alias expansions in wu-2.4(11)

I have aliases set up for a number of directories, which work well,
except as used within a web-browser context.  Since the browser never
performs a 'PWD' after a successfull 'CWD' it doesn't see that it has
been the victim of an alias expansion.

Now there is a positive and a negative associated with this.  The
positive aspect is that aliases can be used to 'hide'  the actual
structure of the file system. This is good for security reasons.   The
negative aspect is that any attempt to retrieve the file results in a
'file not found' error.

This error is only incorrect in that the server is not parsing for
aliases before attempting to stat() the file.  Unfortunately, my C
programming has gone downhill in the last few years from non-use, and I
don't think I'm up to the job of trying to hack ftpd.c into performing
this task.  It looks like the code is available ( cwd() performs this
check ) to do the job.

I'm not sure what the ramifications are of this kind of a patch, but it
seems like adding support for aliases within browsers would be a welcome
thing.

I might try to do this.. I've already fixed the  cwd()  code to
"correctly" strip off trailing  path separator characters, i.e. '/',
from the pathname before checking for aliases.. This helps out a lot for
browser capabilities, and hasn't seemed to hamper functionality.

Any comments?

Leif Sawyer