[sork] Re: expect and passwd

[Eric Rostetter]

Quoting j.huinink at wanadoo.nl:

> I myself had no experience in running expect, but after some browsing through
> documentation and man pages I came up with the following patch that helped me
> debug the expect script.

Sounds good, though I've not yet looked at it.
 
> Expect creates a log file in your upload_tmp_dir (I think this is in your
> php.ini) called passwd.log. If you add the -d flag to the expect command it
> will show all the prompts that expect receives from yout system and the rules
> that it tries to match. This should tell you where and why it fails.

Sounds great.

> Note that the passwd.log file will contain plaintext copies of the password
> so
> you should be very carefull not to test this with sensitive users and/or
> passwords and to remove the debug info in a production environment.

For this reason, I would not want to make this web-available or otherwise
accessible form outside the local system, to answer your question below.

> Eric, I assume that a lot of people who want to use the expect backend will
> have similar problems. How would you feel about including something along the
> lines of the above in the code where the log file is returned in the browser
> or something when you are in debuggin mode?

No, too dangerous, as you note above.  But I'm not against it generating
the debug file on the local host machine.

Thanks for the code!

> Regards,
> Jeroen

-- 
Eric Rostetter
The Department of Physics
The University of Texas at Austin

Why get even? Get odd!