[9fans] Factotum

[9fans] Factotum

[Rodolfo kix Garci­a]

factotum comes from the Charles Bukowski's book?

Re: [9fans] Factotum

[erik quanstrom]

> factotum comes from the Charles Bukowski's book?

i thought the reference was older

	minooka; dict
	*/factotum/
	1	Fac*to"tum
	*1
	  Fac*to"tum (făk*tō"tŭm), n.; pl. Factotums (- tŭmz). [L., do
	everything; facere to do + totus all : cf. F. factotum. See /Fact/,
	and /Total/.] A person employed to do all kinds of work or business.
	B. Jonson.

- erik

Re: [9fans] Factotum

[Pietro Gagliardi]

On May 3, 2008, at 6:54 PM, erik quanstrom wrote:

>> factotum comes from the Charles Bukowski's book?
>
> i thought the reference was older
>
> 	minooka; dict
> 	*/factotum/
> 	1	Fac*to"tum
> 	*1
> 	  Fac*to"tum (făk*tō"tŭm), n.; pl. Factotums (- tŭmz). [L., do
> 	everything; facere to do + totus all : cf. F. factotum. See /Fact/,
> 	and /Total/.] A person employed to do all kinds of work or business.
> 	B. Jonson.
>
> - erik
>
And that definition relates to the factotum system how? We define it  
as so:

	Fac*to"tum (făk*tō"tŭm), n.; pl. Factotums (- tŭmz). [L., do
	everything; facere to do + totus all : cf. F. factotum. See /Fact/,
	and /Total/.] The centralization of anything that has to do
	with authentication.

Given the dictionary definition, Plan 9 is a factotum.

Re: [9fans] Factotum

[Russ Cox]

>> 	  Fac*to"tum (făk*tō"tŭm), n.; pl. Factotums (- tŭmz). [L., do
>> 	everything; facere to do + totus all : cf. F. factotum. See /Fact/,
>> 	and /Total/.] A person employed to do all kinds of work or business.
>> 	B. Jonson.

> And that definition relates to the factotum system how?

In the original usage, a factotum meant a servant who acted on
his master's behalf, taking care of all kinds of business.

Plan 9's factotum acts on your behalf, taking care of all kinds
of authentications.  It's the single do-all authentication agent,
instead of having a separate SSH agent, SSL agent, Kerberos agent,
and so on.

Russ

Re: [9fans] Factotum

[Pietro Gagliardi]

On May 3, 2008, at 9:37 PM, Russ Cox wrote:

>>> 	  Fac*to"tum (făk*tō"tŭm), n.; pl. Factotums (- tŭmz). [L., do
>>> 	everything; facere to do + totus all : cf. F. factotum. See /Fact/,
>>> 	and /Total/.] A person employed to do all kinds of work or  
>>> business.
>>> 	B. Jonson.
>
>> And that definition relates to the factotum system how?
>
> In the original usage, a factotum meant a servant who acted on
> his master's behalf, taking care of all kinds of business.
>
> Plan 9's factotum acts on your behalf, taking care of all kinds
> of authentications.  It's the single do-all authentication agent,
> instead of having a separate SSH agent, SSL agent, Kerberos agent,
> and so on.
>
> Russ
>
>
I just wish it didn't have a bleak memory. Is there a way to force it  
to remember passwords for ftpfs?

Re: [9fans] Factotum

[erik quanstrom]

>>
> I just wish it didn't have a bleak memory. Is there a way to force it
> to remember passwords for ftpfs?

it is not factotum's job to provide persistant storage.  that would
infringe upon secstore's franchise.

- erik

Re: [9fans] Factotum

[Bruce Ellis]

no latin? ok. find the monkees episode where the word is used.

it was shown on cable when presto was going in deep. he has support
from re-runs.

brucee

On Sun, May 4, 2008 at 11:57 AM, erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net> wrote:
> >>
> > I just wish it didn't have a bleak memory. Is there a way to force it
> > to remember passwords for ftpfs?
>
> it is not factotum's job to provide persistant storage.  that would
> infringe upon secstore's franchise.
>
>

Re: [9fans] Factotum

[roger peppe]

On Sun, May 4, 2008 at 2:57 AM, erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net> wrote:
>  it is not factotum's job to provide persistant storage.  that would
>  infringe upon secstore's franchise.

that said, i sometimes wish the interface between factotum and secstore
was a bit more slick, particularly when dealing with protocols (such as
inferno's auth(6)) that don't use a password directly, but instead use another
protocol (e.g. login(6)) to generate a long-term key which is the info that you
want factotum to store.

the stuff with ipso, etc, is fine when all the entries are manually generated,
but seems unnecessarily awkward when automatically generated keys are
involved.

i'd like to see a way of asking factotum "please save your keys to secstore",
although there's some difficulty getting it right, as there are
potentially many factotums
to one secstore, or even worse, several secstores.

Re: [9fans] Factotum

[Eric Van Hensbergen]

On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 4:51 AM, roger peppe <rogpeppe@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  i'd like to see a way of asking factotum "please save your keys to secstore",
>  although there's some difficulty getting it right, as there are
>  potentially many factotums
>  to one secstore, or even worse, several secstores.
>

Plumbing?  May not help with multiple secstores and/or factotums but
having multiples of these seems like a bother.  Should there be some
way to safely consolidate the services?  Or am I just being security
naive?

       -eric

Re: [9fans] Factotum

[erik quanstrom]

>>
>>  i'd like to see a way of asking factotum "please save your keys to secstore",
>>  although there's some difficulty getting it right, as there are
>>  potentially many factotums
>>  to one secstore, or even worse, several secstores.
>>
>
> Plumbing?  May not help with multiple secstores and/or factotums but
> having multiples of these seems like a bother.  Should there be some
> way to safely consolidate the services?  Or am I just being security
> naive?
>
>        -eric

one would generally have multiple factotums if logged into two terminals at
the same time.

the cpu hostowner has one factotum per cpu server.  coraid, for example, has
~5 main cpu servers.

one would generally have one secstore per authentication domain.
i can't reasonablly merge my home secstore server and the one at work,
even if the network were perfectly reliable.

that being said, i don't think that there really is a problem if the process
of moving keys from factotum to secstore were manually driven, as in
	echo dumpkeys secstore.example.com>/mnt/factotum/ctl

another solution would be a command line tool that generates and prints
the long-term key so it can be manually intered into secstore.

i like this solution better because it keeps the information flow
unidirectional.  one can trust a factotum too much.

- erik