On 2005-10-31, joe.powell@lmco.com wrote:
: In May, greatly due to this group's influence, I developed an
: application on a SUSE 8 platform using the FTP client built in Kermit
: 7. This app's only viable method for logging in to a remote server is
: with a userid and password, i.e. no SSL, Kerberos, etc.. It worked very
: well.
:
: We recently switched to a new server which included upgrading from SUSE
: 8 to SUSE 9 and from cKermit 7 to cKermit 8. After this switch, Kermit
: now tries to perform SSL authentication before each session which fails
: because we do not (and never will) have this set up with the servers to
: which we are connecting.
:
: Kermit docs show that it bases its default authentication settings on
: which libraries exist when it is installed.
:
Not exactly. C-Kermit can be built with or without support for various
security methods, including SSL, Kerberos, etc. If you build it yourself
you can control which options are included. For example, "make linux"
builds it with no security at all, in which case it will never try to
make a secure connection (except SSH, for which it uses the external
ssh client, but only if you tell it to make an SSH connection).

: From this and our new
: attempts at SSL authentication, it seems some SSL library(ies) exist on
: our new server that were not on our old server which cause Kermit to
: always attempt SSL authentication by default. I have turned this off
: and restored our app to its former successful functioning by issuing a
: "SET FTP AUTOAUTHENTICATION OFF" before we execute an FTP OPEN. Our sys
: admin states nothing changed in the installations of Kermit on our
: servers.
:
Of course if you have a verion of C-Kermit with security features included,
you can use commands such as the one you mentioned to control their behavior
or disable them altogether.

- Frank