[systemd-devel] password agent helper program and example

[Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek]

On Wed, Aug 05, 2015 at 04:08:02PM -0700, Frederick Roeber wrote:
> Last year, when I was installing a bunch of headless servers, I wrote a
> password agent.
> 
> I wrote a C program to deal with the "hard" part (inotify, NotAfter, the
> socket) and then fork a child to do the "simple" part (in my case, a script
> to flash some LEDs to prompt the user and then read the key(s) from an
> inserted USB stick.)
> 
> It all wraps up in a local rpm I put on my kickstart USB; the kickstart
> file(s) flash the LEDs and generate keys; there's a dracut module so the
> password agent is included in the boot sequence.
> 
> 
> It occurs to me that my password agent helper might be useful to other
> people, either as an example in C, or as a helper so they only have to
> write a simple script to get a password.  I'm now installing F22 on some
> machines, and I'm about to dust off my code.
> 
> Do you guys think my code might be useful, and if so, to whom should I
> offer it?  It's somewhat at the intersection of systemd, dracut, and
> kickstart.
It sounds like something fairly specialized, so I don't think either
of the three projects would want to carry that as part of the codebase.
I think it would be best to put it up somewhere permanent (e.g. as
a repo on github). We could then link from systemd docs or wiki to
this as an example.

Zbyszek