[cvsnt] SSPI permissions issues

Tony Hoyle tmh at nodomain.org
Mon Dec 15 19:47:07 GMT 2003


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Dan Ratanasit wrote:
> I was having this exact same situation. It wouldn't matter if the Windows XP
> Guest account was enabled or disabled, CVSNT identified the client as Guest.
> I got around this by creating a system user acount on the server machine for
> each CVS user. This eliminated the need for the user "Guest" in the passwd
> file. It seems the user "Guest" is necessary only if trying to login with a
> username that does not exist in the passwd file.

That's just the way Windows user authentication works.  If you don't 
have an account on the server it'll try 'Guest'.  That's why it's a 
really bad idea to enable the guest account on a server - it basically 
allows anybody to login without any proper authentication.

For SSPI (or any windows authentication for that matter) to work there 
must be an equivalent user account on the server.

The problem is that XP Home (or Pro with Broken File Sharing enabled) 
doesn't even try to log in as a user - it just tries 'Guest' - then 
probably fails because 99% of systems won't have an active guest 
account.  That is IMO a bug in XP Home.  CVSNT really isn't involved in 
the transaction - it's only calling the standard user authentication 
code at that point.

Recent (2.0.14+) CVSNT clients try to force Windows to use the user 
account rather than Guest, but it doesn't seem to be taking any notice.

> CVSNT will authenticate the user based on that user's Windows password, so
> in the passwd file the entry for the user is simply "username:"

You might as well delete the passwd file, it's pretty pointless with 
SSPI, unless you want to specifically limit the users who can log in.




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