transform REMOTE_USER for display purposes? 🔗 link

There are those who have asked for a way to transform the REMOTE_USER variable when it's used for display purposes (like in the enadis.sh CGI program).  This can be perhaps more desirable when client certs are used with +FakeBasicAuth; the rather long identifying strings then used in the xymonpasswd (or comparable) file are a bit ugly.

AFAIK, Apache's mod_env will not modify standard CGI environment variables; so the CGI's would have to do it.  If they checked if some optional RE was in a config file, they could use that to convert REMOTE_USER into something better suited to display than e.g.
/CN=CAcert WoT User/emailAddress=user-df14c361be72@xymon.invalid
(trivial example of what a free cert from CAcert might show up as); or there could be a file that just mapped REMOTE_USER values to display names.

Overkill, or worthwhile? :-)

I found that Apache breaks out client certificate information so this is
handed to the cgi scripts in the environment:

     SSL_CLIENT_S_DN_CN=MITCHELL.RALPH.xxxxxxx

I still have the big ugly DN string in the passwd file for FakeBasicAuth to
work, but with this:

     REMOTE_USER="$SSL_CLIENT_S_DN_CN"

in /home/xymon/server/etc/cgioptions.cfg, at least the shorter name is used
for the web pages where a test is acked or disabled.

Ralph Mitchell


On Sat, Aug 2, 2014 at 8:12 PM, Richard L. Hamilton <user-af55987f6d56@xymon.invalid>

wrote: