Re: [HACKERS] crypt password authentication does not work in cross platform env

On Wed, 24 Jun 1998 t-ishii(at)sra(dot)co(dot)jp wrote:

> I'm living in outside US and am running the export version of FreeBSD
> coming without DES. Problem is that if I enable the crypt password
> authentication, the FE on any platform other than FreeBSD will not
> talk to the BE on the FreeBSD box (Of course FreeBSD can talk to
> FreeBSD). The export version of FreeBSD's crypt() is implemented using
> MD5, and it does not compatible with the traditional crypt(). This is
> the source of the problem, I guess. I have looked into backend/libpq
> and interfaces/libpq, but I couldn't find any portable solution for
> that so far.

I thought there was only one implementation of crypt()?

When I added crypt support into the JDBC driver, I used an existing java
implementation as a baseline.

Now this works for postgres running on Linux() (& java running on Linux &
Win95), but I haven't heared of a problem with it on other Unixes.

> As far as I know, there are at least 2 workarounds:
>
> 1. install "des" package
> (ftp://ftp.internat.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/2.2.6-RELEASE/des/)
>
> 2. link the BE with libcrypt.a coming with SSLeay
> (see http://www.psy.uq.oz.au/~ftp/Crypto/ for more info about SSLeay)
>
> Should we document these in somewhere?

How accessible is the source, and is it in C?

I'm asking this, because we would have to convert it into Java for the
JDBC driver, and I know the ODBC guys would have to convert it as they
don't use libpq either.

--
Peter Mount, peter(at)maidstone(dot)gov(dot)uk
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