Parameter for the timeout of external auth programs

[rra]

Reported by iulius on 27 Dec 2008 15:34 UTC
nnrpd currently implements a hard-coded five-second timeout for the receipt of the response from external auth programs.

It should be configurable. See nnrpd/auth-ext.c.

[rra]

Comment by iulius on 2 Apr 2015 19:43 UTC
Worthwhile doing it, as it was asked again in news.software.nntp in February 2015.

news:cjffocF6u5bU1@mid.individual.net

I'm running an INN 2.5.3 server, and I need to extend the timeout that
nnrpd waits for a response from an external authenticator (e.g.
ckpasswd). This seems to be hard-coded as 5 seconds.

It looks like the relevant variable is tv.tv_sec, which is set to 5 on
line 205 in auth-ext.c.

Yep, that's the hard-coded value. A comment a bit above says:
"Currently, use a hard-coded five-second timeout for all programs. This
might need to be configurable later."

Can I simply increase this value and recompile to extend the timeout,
or will the cause other problems?

After digging a bit in the code that calls handle_output() and
auth_external(), I do not see a reason why increasing this value
would not work.

Just keep it under the value of clienttimeout in inn.conf (which is very
large anyway) and the 5 minutes of DEFAULT_TIMEOUT in include/inn/options.h.

[Julien-Elie]

This hard-coded five-second timeout parameter could be moved to auth stanzas in readers.conf as it is also where the external auth program to call is parameterized.