[jdev] service banners?

Dave Cridland dave at cridland.net
Wed Jul 19 15:13:13 CDT 2006


On Wed Jul 19 19:55:06 2006, Hal Rottenberg wrote:
> Is what you are asking a valid concern and a good idea?  Yes, I 
> agree
> there.  What I don't want to see is putting any new requirements on
> the clients if that can be avoided.  Putting it on servers is a 
> better
> idea.  I'll leave the question of whether this is technically 
> possible
> to the rest of you guys.
> 
> 
Well, I strongly suspect that immediately after displaying a 
"banner", the client would continue authenticating, so I'm unsure of 
the actual value in working the protocol such that the text is sent 
prior to authentication. SSH, FTP, etc clients have this behaviour.

Basically, the client would continue the authentication 
automatically, where possible, and as I understand Jefferson's 
requirements, that would be taken to mean acceptance, which it quite 
obviously isn't.


> Is an SASL anonymous connection sufficient for the client to be able
> to receive an arbitrary XML stream?  Would a client be expcted to
> display messages during this?  Can one login "trigger" another?  
> Those
> are the sorts of things going around in my head, but again, I'm not
> pretending to know the answers on this part of the discussion.

SASL authentication is designed as a one-way gate - once 
authenticating, trying to authenticate again is an error. This isn't 
an XMPP thing, it's a SASL thing. In theory, the server might have 
dropped permissions needed to handle authentication by then.

There is, however, facility to send a message indicating that the 
terms and conditions have changed (or reminding the newly connected 
user where to find them, or even listing them), by sending a message 
stanza from the server. This works with all clients, and although 
it's post-authentication, the acceptance of these terms could be 
deduced from the first attempt to send a message.

Dave.
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