Message-Id: <199603062043.OAA20658@library.wustl.edu> Date: Wed, 6 Mar 1996 14:39:33 -0600 From: Charles Blair <mailto:chas@NIRVANA.LIB.UCHICAGO.EDU> Subject: Re: Scripted Telnet Destinations To: Multiple recipients of list WEBCAT-L <mailto:WEBCAT-L@WUVMD.WUSTL.EDU>
> I can think of two possibilities for platform-independent solutions:
> 2) Make each link to other catalogs actually be a link to a dummy
> account on your local Unix machine (if you have one), and have the
> dummy account's shell be some sort of a chat script that will log
> the person into the remote catalog.
>
> Neither is perfect, of course, but both seem feasible.
This is the approach I use. I'm not sure what's "imperfect" about it. :-) The "chat script" is actually (something called) expect.
You have to take care of security issues--people shouldn't be able to break out of your scripts and get a shell--but once that's done, things work nicely. The load on our "telnet proxy server" is always very low.
In general, the telnet URL is of this form:
For "alias," use a DNS alias so that you can reassign the telnet proxy functions to another machine, if necessary, without the necessity of changing any URLs.
5013 is an arbitrary number above 1024--we begin numbering at 5000 for this purpose.
You need entries in /etc/services, or equivalent, of the form:
artindex 5013/tcp
/etc/inetd.conf or equivalent has entries of this form:
artindex stream tcp nowait root /host/etc/tcpd /host/bin/telnet d -f /proxy/expect/fs/artindex.exp
artindex.exp in the example is the actual expect script.
Because of security and the fact that you're editing system files, you'll need a systems administrator to set this up, or additionally a security-conscious shell type of programmer, but it is do-able.
For smaller sites the netscape solution someone else mentioned seems like a reasonable approach. For larger sites, with lots of users and "Internet kiosks," with some programming or systems administration support, the approach I outlined works well, I think.