GenHosts

Winter quarter 08, the hosts.allow files used by tcpwrappers was getting unwieldy. For one thing, we had certain groups of hosts that were all allowed to connect to eachother anywhere, some groups that were only allowed one port on one computer, some that were allowed certain parts of machines. It was basically a mess to try and keep up with it. So I wrote a set of scripts to let us update one place and have it synchronize everywhere else, all in very simple XML files.

This worked well, but my bosses also wanted automatic addition to the whitelist upon signing into our customized website. Due to PHP4’s messy XML handling and/or my lack of time, I went the quick and dirty route and wrote a MySQL<->XML interface. This also worked pretty well in the end.

This is pretty much alpha software, but it might be useful to someone out there…