[Spacewalk-list] A flexible authn_spacewalk for Cobbler / related topics

[Michael DeHaan]

As folks may not be aware, we have a authentication plugin that allows 
Cobbler to work with Spacewalk.

Currently this uses a shared secret mechanism to allow spacewalk to 
manipulate cobbler.

A couple things:

* Euclid on IRC points out that it would be awesome if this could work 
with older Satellites (like 5.X) as well as just the new stuff 
(Spacewalk 0.4+).  I agree.   Is there an API we can use to check the 
versions and try older calls to do auth against Satellite's that don't 
yet have Cobbler integration?  

* As I understand it, internally Spacewalk is using special tokens for 
this auth.   Can we also make this accept username and passwords so 
folks can access CobblerWeb?  That would be great, because Cobbler web 
serves as sort of a "cobbler command line for people who don't like 
command lines".   It's another web app but it does surface some things 
that spacewalk won't surface for some time, and if it allows the same 
username/passwords that will be really simple to access.

Any suggestions on how to change the authenticator to best do both of these?

Here's the latest I have now, written for Spacewalk:

http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/?p=cobbler;a=blob_plain;f=cobbler/modules/authn_spacewalk.py;hb=1aae8e137ddf857e65027f492fbdff9a373fdd13

Thanks!

--Michael