[vbox-dev] Custom external VRDP authentication

[James Lucas]

>From what I have read in the forums and mailling lists, there aren't 
any custom VRDP auth plugins written for VirtualBox yet.

I've given it a go and have been trying to get my head around a few 
issues that I've run into. Any help would be appreciated.

Background is we have an xlmrpc based authentication service that knows 
which users has which virtual machine running on a headless server). 
I've written the plugin to use the xmlrpc-c libraries to request 
authentication/authorisation and grant/disallow access on a boolean 
return from the xmlrpc service. I've chosen to use xmlrpc-c because it 
handles failures well and can be implemented in only a few lines of code 
on the client side.

A simple plugin works fine (Eg just returning success with some syslog 
code thrown for logging/debugging). However if I link my shared library 
to another library (ie xmlrpc-c library) then Virtual Box refuses to 
load the external plugin with a VERR_FILE_NOT_FOUND error (strange that 
it doesn't report a failure to load the library instead).

Has anyone else tried to write their own external authenticator? I would 
like to know if there are any tricks for when the external authenticator 
needs to link off some other shared libraries (which nearly all external 
authenticator would need to do).

This is a feature that has always been included in the VirtualBox 
feature set, yet it seems that no one has used it. Having this would 
solve an issue we have with a shared headless server that is running 
multiple vms.

Regards,
    James

-- 

James Lucas
Senior IT Systems Administrator
Faculty of Engineering                           
University of Technology, Sydney     


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