Changes between Initial Version and Version 2 of Ticket #490


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Timestamp:
04/15/10 21:07:22 (14 years ago)
Author:
geofft
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  • Ticket #490 – Description

    initial v2  
    1 As described in #413, it's easier to assume $ATHENA_USER is always set instead of making sure everything supports `${ATHENA_USER:-$USER}`. We almost always set $ATHENA_USER, but there are not-particularly-pathological circumstances under which it can fail to be set; we can either do this more aggressively in dotfiles or abuse PAM. 
     1There are not-particularly-pathological circumstances under which `$ATHENA_USER` is unset for an account it is ordinarily set for. Since it's easier to use a single environment variable where we want an Athena username instead of making sure everything is capable of understanding the `${ATHENA_USER:-$USER}` syntax (cf. #413), we should consider being more aggressive about setting `$ATHENA_USER`, either by doing it in different dotfiles or in PAM somehow. 
    22 
     3(Besides, as #553 points out, `${ATHENA_USER:-$USER}` is sometimes wrong; there are local accounts that don't actually have an Athena user that corresponds to them.) 
     4 
     5As a specific example of when this might fail to be set: 
    36{{{ 
    47dr-wily:~ geofft$ ssh kid 'echo $ATHENA_USER' 
    58 
    6 dr-wily:~ geofft$ ssh kid 'echo $USER' 
     9dr-wily:~ geofft$ ssh kid 
     10[...] 
     11kid-icarus:~ geofft$ echo $ATHENA_USER 
    712geofft 
    813}}} 
     14So, for instance, X-forwarded applications without a shell around them won't see `$ATHENA_USER` (consider `ssh kid thunderbird` for instance), but they will if I start them from a shell, which is confusingly inconsistent.