[scponly] scponly 4.2 release in the not so distant future

[user]

> On that note, consider this email early warning that I do intend to do another scponly release in the 
> not-so-distant future, and so if you guys have any specific suggestions regarding 4.2, now is the time to bring it 
> up.  I do keep all the ones already sent, but dont hesitate to restate anything for discussion on the list if I 
> forgot to reply the first time (which I tend to do).
> 
> I know there are autoconf patches outstanding, as well as patches to support md5sum and quota commands.  I think 
> there is also some grumbling about cvs and rdist that I could address in 4.2 as well.  Any other ideas?


Well, besides the rdist support that I mentioned in the other thread,
there is one more feature that I would really like to see, and that would
be useful to others as well.

When someone uses scponly as their shell, and they use normal ssh to login
to the host, they are greeted with the system banner message, followed by
nothing.  If they hit the enter key, they receive this message:

WinSCP: this is end-of-file:0

What I would like to see is, either in place of, or in addition to(if it
is necessary to have it for other reasons or compatibilities) that
end-of-file message, is the text output of a sysadmin definable command
string.

So perhaps one sysadmin wants people to see the output of:

df -k | grep "/dev/ad2s1h"

or maybe another sysadmin wants their users to see:

du -ak $homedir | tail -1

or someone else wants to show:

df -k | grep "/dev/ad2s1h" | awk '{print $5}' && find $homedir | wc -l

... and so on.

The point is, you can add specific support to scponly to show disk space,
or to show quotas, etc. - using special code and special cases for each
individual system specific instance that exists - and open up a huge can
of worms.

OR

you can just allow people to spit out the text output of some system-wide,
group-wide, or user-specific command, with a few variables such as
$username or $homedir or $hostname specified, and just let people figure
out their site specific / system specific configurations themselves.

I think the latter is a better option.

If it is easy to pass variables (at the minimum, you would need $username
and $homedir) and you don't mind putting in another config file that
allows you to define a command output systemwide, groupwide or
user-specific, then I think this shouldn't be that hard to implement, and
would be very useful.

Thanks.