[AVaRICE-user] Re: AVaRICE patch

[Joerg W. <j...@ur...>]

As Theodore A. Roth wrote:

> I have committed this patch from Joerg Wunsch. It adds defaults for
> hostname and port so that the following are equivalent:
> 
>   $ avarice localhost 4242
> 
>   $ avarice

Actually, it's the equivalent to

avarice 0.0.0.0 4242

0.0.0.0 translates to INADDR_ANY and, when used in a listen() context
(as it happens here), means ``listen on any possible interface and
address on this host''.  (When used in a connect() context, it means
``this host'', which is indead roughly equivalent to `localhost'.)

So if you're really concerned about disallowing connects to IP
addresses != 127.1, you should indeed still use "localhost".  However,
this is not a very strong security protection either, since someone
who's source-routing 127.1 to your host could still send you packets
to that address anyway.  Perhaps we should implement AF_LOCAL sockets
as well (formerly known as AF_UNIX) to completely forbid AF_INET
connections, but i'm not sure whether GDB would accept them at all.

There's one other side-effect of the implementation i've chose, in
that numerical IP addresses are guaranteed to be allowed now as well.
Previously, they used to be possible as a side-effect of the DNS
resolver implementation for people who were using DNS name resolution,
but i'm not even sure whether this approach has been portable at all.

Thanks, Ted!
-- 
cheers, J"org               .-.-.   --... ...--   -.. .  DL8DTL

http://www.sax.de/~joerg/                        NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)