Eskimo...

[Robert Dinse <nanook@eskimo.com>]

     Relating to a post I made a while back about what I want to do with
Eskimo, I've had quite a few people offer to help and I will get back to you
all but can't handle the mail volume in real-time just yet so please be
patient.

     I'm going to establish a local news group and possibly a mailing list
to facilitate communications on this topic.

     I intend to mostly impliment this in a combination of C, Javascript, and
Java, although there may be some perl, shell script, and other things, but
as much as possible in C.  Java will be necessary for some things because there
just is no way to get a web browser to do some of the things we need except
Java.

     And on that topic, one of the things I desperately need to know is how to
create a signed Java applet.  If anybody is familiar with this process that is
an area I can definitely use some help with.

     Right now I'm still chasing down hardware, etc.  My intent at this point
is to get DSL up and the news server replaced because these are both revenue
generating items that will help pay for other things down the road. 

     Then network infrastructure and hardware, so we've got the faster hardware
in place which will make the development of the software go faster by reducing
the compile/test/debug cycle time.

     At this point, DSL should be available at about the end of this month,
the third T1 to Sprint to reduce network clog should be here around June 11th,
though that may be delayed slightly because of a facilities assignment error.

     I'm still working the drive issue for the news server.  Any info on good
places to shop for high capacity SCSI drives would be helpful. 

     But once the more basic physical infrastructure issues are addressed,
there are some things that are absolutely necessary to this project, and
they include:

     The ability to create signed Java Applets, we've got an old version of JDK
(1.0) on the Eskimo shell server, and down the road at some point we'll get a
newer version on a Linux box (newer versions not ported to SunOS).  Creating
applets is not difficult in and of itself, but they need to be signed in order
to access things like files, ports on servers other than the webserver, etc,
which are things that will be necessary.

     Another thing I need to come up with is a secure login scheme, where
someone can login from the web, with their login and password, and some sort of
cryptographic cookie will be provided that will identify future accesses as
them.  This will both need a logout function that will invalidate the cookie
and some form of timeout. 

     On this end, it will also require databasing of invalid login attempts so
that if someone tries a login say more than three times in a short period of
time, that login is disabled for some period of time to prevent dictionary
attacks, alternately multiple unsuccessful attempts from a common IP address in
a short period of time should disable logins from that IP address for the same
reason. 

     The cookie produced has to be something that would be very difficult to
generate without the aid of the login program and unique to each session so
that it can't be saved and replayed later.  It should be tied to the
originating IP address so someone intercepting the communications can't use it. 

     This is so central to so many other things that it's something I'd like to
start attacking now while the physical issues are being addressed.