telnet & ftp official status

[Jeffrey Hutzelman]

--On Saturday, October 04, 2008 01:04:41 PM -0400 Ken Raeburn 
<raeburn at MIT.EDU> wrote:

> On Oct 4, 2008, at 12:16, Jeffrey Hutzelman wrote:
>> Sadly, I don't think it would help much.  What the protocol actually
>> carries is a GSS major and minor status and a text message.  A server
>
> Since the minor status values are mechanism- and implementation-specific
> (and in MIT's current code, could theoretically be allocated at run time
> in certain cases), transferring them from the server is kind of useless.
> The text message may be useful, though.

They're only useless to client implementors, because they don't know what 
they're talking to.  In real deployments using this mechanism, it will 
often be the case that the user knows what they're talking or, or their 
sysadmin does, or their help desk has a list of codes and what to do about 
them, prepared by someone who knows.

Or at least, that'd be the case if this were ever used.


FWIW, I thought the minor_status values were implementation-dependent, too, 
but RFC2743 only calls them mechanism-specific.  So at a minimum, I think 
it is possible to have mechanisms which specify their meaning, even though 
the Kerberos V mechanism does not do so.

-- Jeff