when last we saw our hero (Wednesday, Jun 19, 2002), Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom was madly tapping out: > > - common authentication infrastructure - karl has offered a server to > > handle some of the elements associated with creating a common > > authentication infrastructure. i suggest interested parties start > > hammering out designs for this element > > let's start by asking the fundamental question of 'what are we trying to do > here?' i think that the basic goal here is to provide an authentication mechanism that folks within the group can use to determine who they want to share access with. additionally, i think that it makes a lot of sense to provide simple things like dns for these nodes to unify the infrastructure. > > possible answers that have been discussed: > - roaming NoCatAuth authentication: if NoCatAuth admins subscribe to a > centralized authentication service, users who register with that service > can go to NoCatAuth nodes that subscribe to the service, and get > connectivity. this is what i was referring to regarding the authentication side of things. > - simple dynamic DNS, using wget and a CGI > - 'real' DDNS, with BIND 9 the management of dns is largely tangential to this but key nonetheless. looks like another element for attention as well. > > all of the above could be done, no problem. > > the first two, are the sort of thing that killdeer.tcwug.org was intended for. > > the last one, Nate Carlson has generously offered to host on his own DNS > server. I judge that to be a superior idea to using killdeer.tcwug.org; tho > killdeer could be used as a secondary DNS server. (considering that they're > in the same rack, and share the same UPS and hub, the value of that is a bit > dubious, tho). i have a couple machine that can be secondary dns servers. my home network has a couple of machine which i can segment for this and i have machines scattered in colocation facilities around the country which can be used for this purpose as well. i don't think that we're at a loss for this type of capacity. i think that anything we do should be hosted in several locations. i'm a big fan of redundancy in this type of application. > > are there any other ideas that I have missed? > -- steve ulrich sulrich at botwerks.org PGP: 8D0B 0EE9 E700 A6CF ABA7 AE5F 4FD4 07C9 133B FAFC