Re: [bug-inetutils] ftpd segfault

[Simon Josefsson]

Michal Mazurek <address@hidden> writes:

> On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 02:21:14PM +0100, Simon Josefsson wrote:
>> Simon Josefsson <address@hidden> writes:
>> 
>> > 2) The '-a' parameter seems to be used for other things by BSD ftpd:
>> >
>> >      -a      Give anonymous an other login-name (anonymous and ftpd will 
>> > still
>> >              work).
>> >
>> > Do we have some parameter confusion here?
>> 
>> The '-a' parameter seems particular troublesome.  The above was actually
>> from my Debian system.
>> 
>> On Solaris it is:
>> 
>>      -a              Enables use of the ftpaccess(4) file.
>> 
>> On FreeBSD [1] it is:
>> 
>>   -a         When -D is specified, accept connections only on the specified
>>    address. 
>> 
>> And on InetUtils it is:
>> 
>>   -a, --auth=[AUTH]         Use AUTH for authentication, it can be:
>> 
>> I think InetUtils is the same as Heimdal and MIT Kerberos though.
>> 
>> Sigh.  This is just an observation, I'm not arguing InetUtils should
>> change its behaviour.
>
> I'd like to add that OpenBSD's ftpd does not have an -a switch.

Great.

Are there any standards that specify 'ftpd' behaviour that we care to
align us with?  I checked POSIX but it doesn't appear to standardize
ftpd.  I don't see anything obvious on the wikipedia page either:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ftpd

I suggest we apply the patch I came up with to silence the crash, and
simply forget about the compatibility issues of 'ftpd -a'.  Btw, thanks
for testing.

/Simon