Re: Emerald Questions

Dale E. Reed Jr. ( (no email) )
Wed, 05 Mar 1997 01:34:01 -0800

Greg Boehnlein wrote:
>
> What about the question that I posed regarding some sort of encryption on
> the Exported Account Info? This is a SERIOUS PROBLEM in my humble opinion
> and is causing me to re-think my strategy of using Emerald to
> automatically create the accounts on my Unix system. This cuts out a large
> reason for choosing Emerald and will force me to use Humanoids to enter
> and setup the accounts.

Humanoids and paper. That is generally just as in-secure. Clear
text passwords? Is it that you don't trust your unix system? There is
typically only a couple of entries in that file at any time. If you
can't secure a file, like spasswd or the extends file, then you have
worse problems to deal with, IMHO. The md5 routines will be available
shortly in Emerald, and we could make a secure export, if that would
make you feel any more confortable.

> I would propose, also, that in some future versions of the software an
> "Export" module be included that would allow you to select specific fields
> to be exported and the format of the Export File. There are times when a
> Comma Delimited file would be easier to deal with. There are also times
> when only a pair of fields might be neccessary. Having the control would
> be an excellent selling point.

Command Delimited files, unless quote wrapped, are not that useful,
although
not bad. Tab delimited (our current format) is much easier to parse,
and
almost all import engines support it. I agree about the export, but
unfortunately, we are talking about a feature only about 2% of the
Emerald
customer base would ever use. Weigh that against many of the requests
we
are asked by moe that 90% of the users, and it seems difficult on our
part to jusitfy.

We are not turning our backs to the issue, by any means, we just have to
be careful about resources and time consumption.

> I assume that you are simply exporting the output from an SQL query?

"simply" is an under-statement. There are many rules to take into
consideratin for the export that can complicate things. I do not
think it would be that difficult for someone to write a quick interface
to do the export, either. Getting the data out of Emerald is the easy
part. What is done with it on the other end, is generally the
challenge.

-- Dale E. Reed Jr.  (daler@iea.com)_________________________________________________________________       IEA Software, Inc.      |  RadiusNT, Emerald, and NT FAQs Internet Solutions for Today  |    http://www.emerald.iea.com