Re: [9front] Introduction and regarding guidance

[sirjofri <sirjofri+ml-9front@sirjofri.de>]

Hello,

02.06.2022 03:54:41 Noam Preil <noam@pixelhero.dev>:
> I looked into this a few months ago for much the same reason.
>
> First, drawterm has to auth *to* the remote, to start the session. To 
> do
> so via secstore, it loads the auth key from secstore, discards the
> secstore file, and uses the key to auth in (then forgetting the key as
> with any other).
>
> Factotum loaded *from the remote end* then gets started, and wants the
> keys from secstore. So, it logs into secstore as with any other time
> you run auth/factotum in userspace.
>
> In theory, there's a couple solutions:
>
> * Accept the status quo. This isn't a great answer, but really there's
> two things doing authentication, so why *shouldn't* it ask for the
> password twice?

That's what I currently personally do. Also sometimes you don't need a 
factotum at all.

> * Well, maybe there shouldn't be two things during authentication. If
> factotum is run *by drawterm*, and that normal factotum is used for
> initial auth, then there's no need to run factotum after connecting, 
> and
> the password only gets asked for once.

If you look in default lib/profile that's what is done here: the 
/mnt/term/dev/secstore file is read into /mnt/factotum/ctl to add the 
keys, then the file is cleared. So much for the theory, I never got it 
working.

> * Or, maybe drawterm should hold on to the factotum keys from secstore,
> seed them to the factotum, and *then* forget them.

In lib/profile this isn't done by drawterm, and I think drawterm should 
be agnostic to the factotum system of the host.

> There's probably a couple options I haven't thought of. The hardest 
> part
> is to figure out *desired* behavior. Once that's known, the actual code
> should be relatively straightforward.

What I believe would be a huge step forward: imagine drawterm just has a 
full factotum device like a 9 host. You could just forget about running a 
factotum on the host at all, and just bind /mnt/term/mnt/drawterm 
/mnt/drawterm and call it a day. It would be possible, but someone has to 
port factotum to drawterm, I can imagine it's not that easy because of 
platform specific code.

Some magician who listens could do that.

My 2 cents, as a drawterm-on-windows user.

sirjofri