                            remctl release 1.12
            (remote authenticated command execution with ACLs)

                         Written by Anton Ushakov
         Currently maintained by Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>

  Copyright 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 Board of Trustees, Leland
  Stanford Jr. University.  This software is distributed under a
  BSD-style license.  Please see the section LICENSE below for more
  information.

DESCRIPTION

  remctl is a client/server application that supports remote execution of
  specific commands, using Kerberos v5 GSSAPI for authentication.  Which
  commands a given user can execute is controlled by a configuration file
  and ACL files and can be easily tightly limited, unlike with rsh.

  remctld is very similar to a CGI server that uses a different network
  protocol than HTTP and always does strong authentication before
  executing the desired command.  Alternately, you can think of it as a
  very simple combination of Kerberos rsh and sudo, without most of the
  features of both but with simpler authorization.

  This package was developed to replace the use of sysctl, another package
  that allowed remote code execution with Kerberos (v4) authentication.
  sysctl embedded Tcl and allowed for arbitrary Tcl code to be run, but at
  Stanford we found that in practice all we did with it was execute
  programs on the host system.  remctl is a Kerberos v5 equivalent that
  does only the portions we actually needed.

  Both C and Java clients are provided.  The design documentation is
  available in docs/design.html.

REQUIREMENTS

  The remctld server and the standard client are written in C and require
  a C compiler to build.  They currently require MIT Kerberos; remctl will
  build against Heimdal but the resulting client cannot talk to an MIT
  Kerberos server (or possibly any server; I haven't been able to check).
  Any help in fixing this would be greatly appreciated.

  A Java client is also available in the java subdirectory, but no Java
  server is available.

INSTALLATION

  You can build and install remctl with the standard commands:

      ./configure
      make
      make install

  The last step will probably have to be done as root.  By default, remctl
  installs itself under /usr/local; you can change that path by passing
  the --prefix=PATH argument to configure.

  Normally, configure will use krb5-config to determine the flags to use
  to compile with your Kerberos libraries.  If krb5-config isn't found, it
  will look for the standard Kerberos libraries in locations already
  searched by your compiler.  If the the krb5-config script first in your
  path is not the one corresponding to the Kerberos libraries you want to
  use or if your Kerberos libraries and includes aren't in a location
  searched by default by your compiler, you need to specify
  --with-kerberos=PATH:

      ./configure --with-kerberos=/usr/pubsw

  To specify a particular krb5-config script to use, either set the
  KRB5_CONFIG environment variable or pass it to configure like:

      ./configure KRB5_CONFIG=/path/to/krb5-config

  To build against the static versions of the Kerberos libraries so that
  you don't have to have the Kerberos libraries installed on a system
  running the client or server, add --enable-static to ./configure.  This
  has been tested on Solaris and Linux and may not work properly on other
  platforms.

  Usage information is available in the manual pages which will be
  installed with remctl.  You will need to set up a remctl.conf file for
  the server; see docs/remctl.conf for an example.  The default location
  for remctl.conf is <prefix>/etc, but can be changed with the
  --sysconfdir flag to configure.

  You can pass the --enable-reduced-depends flag to configure to try to
  minimize the shared library dependencies encoded in the binaries.  This
  omits from the link line all the libraries included solely because the
  Kerberos libraries depend on them and instead links the programs only
  against libraries whose APIs are called directly.  This will only work
  with shared Kerberos libraries and will only work on platforms where
  shared libraries properly encode their own dependencies (such as Linux).
  It is intended primarily for building packages for Linux distributions
  to avoid encoding unnecessary shared library dependencies that make
  shared library migrations more difficult.  If none of the above made any
  sense to you, don't bother with this flag.

PORTING

  remctl should port reasonably well.  It has been tested on:

      Solaris 8
      Linux (glibc 2.2, 2.3)

  but should work on any Unix varient.  A replacement snprintf is provided
  for platforms whose snprintf does not comply with C99.

LICENSE

  Copyright 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 Board of Trustees, Leland
  Stanford Jr. University.  All rights reserved.
    
  Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its
  documentation for any purpose and without fee is hereby granted,
  provided that the above copyright notice appear in all copies and that
  both that copyright notice and this permission notice appear in
  supporting documentation, and that the name of Stanford University not
  be used in advertising or publicity pertaining to distribution of the
  software without specific, written prior permission.  Stanford
  University makes no representations about the suitability of this
  software for any purpose.  It is provided "as is" without express or
  implied warranty.

  THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED
  WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF
  MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
