=head1 NNRPD External Authentication Support

This is $Revision: 7141 $ dated $Date: 2005-03-17 03:42:46 -0800 (Thu, 17 Mar 2005) $.

A fundamental part of the readers.conf(5)-based authorization mechanism
is the interface to external authenticator and resolver programs.  This
interface is documented below.

INN ships with a number of such programs (all written in C, although any
language can be used).  Code for them can be found in F<authprogs/> of
the source tree; the authenticators are installed to
I<pathbin>/auth/passwd, and the resolvers are installed to
I<pathbin>/auth/resolv.

=head1 Reading information from nnrpd

When nnrpd spawns an external auth program, it passes information on
standard input as a sequence of "key: value" lines.  Each line ends with
CRLF, and a line consisting of only "." indicates the end of the input.
The order of the fields is not significant.  Additional fields not
mentioned below may be included; this should not be cause for alarm.

(For robustness as well as ease of debugging, it is probably wise to
accept line endings consisting only of LF, and to treat EOF as
indicating the end of the input even if "." has not been received.)

Code which reads information in the format discussed below and parses it
into convenient structures is available authenticators and resolvers
written in C; see libauth(3) for details.  Use of the libauth library
will make these programs substantially easier to write and more robust.

=head2 For authenticators

When nnrpd calls an authenticator, the lines it passes are

    ClientAuthname: user\r\n
    ClientPassword: pass\r\n

where I<user> and I<pass> are the username and password provided by the
client (e.g. using AUTHINFO).  In addition, nnrpd generally also passes
the fields mentioned as intended for resolvers; it rare instances this
data may be useful for authenticators.

=head2 For resolvers

When nnrpd calls a resolver, the lines it passes are

    ClientHost: hostname\r\n
    ClientIP: IP-address\r\n
    ClientPort: port\r\n
    LocalIP: IP-address\r\n
    LocalPort: port\r\n
    .\r\n

where I<hostname> indicates a string representing the hostname if
available, I<IP-address> is a numeric IP address (dotted-quad for IPv4,
equivalent for IPv6 if appropriate), and I<port> is a numeric port
number.  (The I<LocalIP> paramter may be useful for determining which
interface was used for the incoming connection.)

If information is not available, nnrpd will omit the corresponding
fields.  In particular, this applies to the unusual situation of nnrpd
not being connected to a socket; TCP-related information is not
available for standard input.

=head1 Returning information to nnrpd

=head2 Exit status and signals

The external auth program must exit with a status of C<0> to indicate
success; any other exit status indicates failure.  (The non-zero exit
value will be logged.)

If the program dies due to catching a signal (for example, a
segmentation fault occurs), this will be logged and treated as a
failure.

=head2 Returning a username and domain

If the program succeeds, it must return a username string (optionally
with a domain appended) by writing to standard output.  The line it
should write is exactly:

    user:username\r\n

where I<username> is the string that nnrpd should use in matching
readers.conf access blocks.

There should be no extra spaces in lines sent from the hook to nnrpd;
C<user:aidan> is read by nnrpd as a different username than C<user:
aidan>.

=head1 Error messages

As mentioned above, errors can be indicated by a non-zero exit value, or
termination due to an unhandled signal; both cases are logged by nnrpd.
However, external auth programs may wish to log error messages
separately.

Although nnrpd will syslog() anything an external auth program writes to
standard error, it is generally better to use the F<messages.h>
functions, such as warn() and die().

Please use the ckpasswd.c program as an example for any authenticators
you write, and ident.c as an example for any resolvers.

=head1 HISTORY

Written by Aidan Cully for InterNetNews.  This documentation rewritten
in POD by Jeffrey M. Vinocur <jeff@litech.org>.

=cut
