8 Jan 2002 (updated 8 Jan 2002 at 20:54 UTC)
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I was out sick on Monday, still sick today, but I figured
I'd come in for a few hours just to keep stuff from slipping
too far.
--
Still getting stuff to compile after the re-arrangement. A
couple of header files went away, making life vastly more
amusing (from the comedy of errors perspective).
--
On the non-work side of things, I've started considering a
couple of different projects: extending the sftp client
(from OpenSSH) to provide more functionality along the lines
of ncftp, and a distributed chat client/server w/ built in
encryption and authentication. I'd like to use sftp more for
files transfers, but it's functionality is so limited (kind
of like using the Windows command line ftp client) that I
find myself just using ssh and scp. Distributed chat isn't a
new idea, but I haven't seen anything out there that really
takes security into consideration from the ground up (as
opposed to just bolting it onto the side). Most likely, I'd
use the OpenSSL and OpenSSH libraries, with (and this just
came to me) the ability to go out to the key servers to grab
public keys. The basic idea is to have a single program
that's both client and server. Start it up, decide which, if
any, channels to accept incoming connections for and then
tell it what other servers to connect to. Kind of similar to
the star topology of IRC, but where anybody can be a
server. When people connect, they either provide a public
key to authenticate against (which will be cached for some
period of time beyond the end of their connection) or a key
server address to get it from. There's several
inefficiencies there, but hey, this is still in the
"restaurant napkin" stage.