Freeradius-client some application development issues

[Geoff Mitchell]

I have been attempting to develop a Radius method of authentication for
courier-imap. During this time I have come across several issues, and at the
moment I am actually using the radiusclient-ng library, which is the basis
for the freeradius-client library. The reason for having to use this older
version of the library is because of seg faults caused by the use of the
gethostbyname_r function, and the result set it returns. Now I believe in
what freeradius.org does, and I am a big fan of the server, so I want to try
and help clean this up to improve the library.

I am using Debian etch, and these problems could be specific to that distro.
However, to start off the function gethostbyname_r is setting the returned
h_addr_list, within the hostbuf, to the pointer tmphostbuf which the client
library malloc's, and then free's within rc_gethostbyname. This causes a seg
fault by the fact that the memory space has now been freed, and then
accessed. There also seems to be another problem along these lines, because
even removing the temphostbuf free results in a seg fault when the data is
accessed in the function that called rc_gethostbyname, but not when accessed
with the function. I am still trying to track down the cause of this second
seg fault, hence why I have not submitted a patch.

Another issue I have come across is the handling of the config file. Now I
would like to use one config file for application specific, and library,
values. This is not possible purely because of the way that find_options,
which is called by rc_read_config, uses a hard coded value "NUM_OPTIONS".
Would you accept this value being moved into the rc_handle structure. This
would then allow for the config_options to be expanded by the application,
and thus a single config would work. At the moment expanding the options
involves modifying the options.h and recompiling the library, that then
makes it application specific.

Geoff