security updates:
various commands that change or create account passwords now disallow
the user name, display name or email from being contained in it. this
will force users to not use public information inside the password,
hardening password security a little.
the root user name is now changeable and required to be changed on
initial login. this harden security a little by giving host admins the
option to not have a well known user name attached to a high privileged
account.
users can no longer re-use the old password and/or user name when
required to change. however, this does not actually implement full
password history because the user can then later change the password
back to the old password after the required change.
the host can longer block by ip addresses and the auto block threshold
setting has been removed. something like this is best left up to
firewalls, routers, switches or any other networking infrastructure. in
the future i can consider adding event triggering that run certain
admin defined external or internal commands when the host detects
certain event thresholds.
minor changes/bug fixes:
all commands that change or create user names now no longer accept
user names that looks like an mail address. this works out better for
clients when differentiating logging in via user name or email address.
the recover_acct command now also have cancel on blank text options
making it more consistent with all other commands that take text input.
resetting the root user's account password via command line now also
unlocks it if locked.
the -help and -about command line options no longer display the
default password. a new -default_pw option was added for this purpose.
the -status -addr or -stop command line options require super user
privileges to run properly depending on how the host is installed.
an error message like "permission denied" was addded on failure to
make this requirement clear to the end user.
fs_copy and fs_move now does implicit skip on error instead of stop on
error.
the IDLE frame type id now carry an integer return code that can be
interpreted by clients to determine the result of the command that was
sent to the host.
house keeping:
all documentation was updated to reflect the changes made in this commit.
the module tester example is no longer relevant to this project so it
was deleted.
Made some major changes to the project to facilitate a lighter code base and the
must flexible module interface possible.
-the mutli-process architecture now operate at the command object level so each
command now operate in it's own process instead of a single process handling
multiple command objects.
-each module is now an independent application that will now tell the session
object all of the commands it can run via named pipe. during command execution,
it will run the requested command object also running io with the session object
via named pipe.
with this change, it is now possible for modules to be developed in different
versions or QT or entirely different languages. the only requirement is the need
to support named pipes. shared memory segments is also a nice to have but not
needed.
-clients can now run multiple instances of the same command via changes to the
protocol. mrci frames will now include a branch id along with the command id.
the branch id can be used by clients to differentiate the io between instances
of the same command.
-the command states are longer controlled by a single object. it will now be up
to the command object (internal/exterenal) to send an IDLE frame to the client
to notify it that the command has finished. the session object will still track
if the command is in idle state or not but not directly control it.
-must async commands now use binary formatted data instead of TEXT as a way to
reduce overhead.
-all command objects can now send async commands. it is no longer limited to just
internal commands, however; the data of these async commands are verified by
session in some way to prevent host crashing due to malformed data.
-changed up the database structure to rely more on user ids, channel ids and
removed all foreign keys pointing to user names, channel names and sub-channel
names. also removed the groups table altogether. instead, the host rank is now
directly attached to the user data in the users table.
-changed the query object to now support the INNER JOIN SQL clause. this change
was needed to support the new database structure.
-version negotiation is now one-way via tcp connection or module interface.
the host will make it's own verion numner known to the client connected via
tcp or the module connected via named pipe. it will now be entirely up to the
client or module to decide if they support the host. another change in this
regard is the removal of the import rev for the modules. compatibility for
modules shall now use just the host verion.
-removed ls_cmds and cmd_info. the NEW_CMD frame now carries all information
about the command (cmd_id, cmd_name, summery, io and full_description) so it
is now possible for the clients to display the command documentation instead
of the host.
Documentation for the internal commands were updated to reflect the changes but
all other documentation will need to be updated in the near future.
