CCSO (aka CSO or PH) Nameserver Module

The CCSO Nameserver Module is designed for communicating with CCSO nameservers (sometimes known as CSO or PH servers) from Python scripts. CCSO servers are mostly used as electronic phone books and as ways to maintain site-wide e-mail addresses.

Getting a Copy

The CCSO Nameserver Module is currently available as a single text file.

Installation

Copy the ccso.py file to somewhere that the Python interpreter can find it. A likely choice might be /usr/local/lib/site-python or /usr/local/lib/python1.4.

Usage

The CCSO library provides two classes, Local and Network.

Local

When creating an instance of Local you can supply one optional parameter. That parameter is the pathname of qi, the CCSO Query Interpreter. The default is /usr/local/sbin/qi (because that's what it is on my system). qi will always be invoked with the -q flag so that prompts don't have to be parsed.

Network

The Network class has two optional parameters when creating an instance. The first parameter is the name of the host that the server is running on. The default host name is 'localhost'. The second optional parameter is the port that the server is listening to. The default port is 105 or whatever port csnet-ns is defined as on your system.

Methods Common to Both Network and Local Classes

The Local and Network classes have a common interface. In fact 90% of the interface is implemented in a common superclass. All that the Local and Network classes do are provide definitions for some low-level I/O functions.

• query(query_string) - sends a query to the database server. Returns a list of dictionaries that contain the reponses to your query.
• login(alias, password) - logs into the database server. Logging in allows changes to be made to the database.
• logout() - logs out of the server but leaves the connection in place.
• othercmd(cmd) - send a raw command to the database server and get back a (mostly) raw response.
• close() - close the connection to the database server.

Examples

Simple Query

import site #if ccso.py is in your site-python directory
import ccso

s = ccso.Network()
print s.query('Tom Jones')

Creating an Entry

import site #if ccso.py is in your site-python directory
import ccso

s = ccso.Local()
r = ccso.othercmd('make alias=testuser name="Test User" '
                  'email="testuser@somedomain.com"')
if r[-1] == 200:
    print 'OK'
else:
    print 'NOT OK'

References

• PH/CSONameserver FAQ

  Probably the best place to start if you are looking for more information.

• The CCSO Nameserver Home Page

  Where you can get the latest sources.

History

Version 0.4, February 11, 1997

Woohoo! Password encryption is now supported! Thanks to Andy Steingruebl who pointed me to Perl's Net::PH module, I was able to figure out how to write the encryption code in Python. The C code in the CCSO distribution relied on the fact that integer multiplication in C does not generate an exception when the result of a multiplication overflows. I hadn't applied enough brain power to figure it out, so the Net::PH code helped tremendously.

Version 0.3, January 27, 1997

Wow, but it's been a long time since I've worken on this. But, I started a new job and I needed to access our CSO server from Python. My old code wasn't quite up to snuff, so I've made some changes.

The biggest change is in how you specify the connection to the server. I needed to be able to talk to qi running as a subprocess of the Python script. The CCSO class is now a superclass that implements the generic behavior, while the subclasses Local and Network implement the specific details of connecting to a local server or a remote server.

Version 0.2, November 10, 1994

Bugs fixed:

• In method query(), resp[0] and resp[1] needed to be changed to response[0] and response[1]. Thanks to Ray Price rlprice@ka.reg.uci.edu.

• In get_response(), the return of digits.match() was not checked properly.

Features added:

• login(alias)/logout() methods allow you to log into the database. Passwords are currently sent in the clear, but I'm working on adding the encrypting of the login challenge. Unfortunately, this will require some C code.

• othercmd(str) method for sending your own commands to the server. Could be useful for sending "make" commands when you are logged in. Returns the raw responses (but parsed out into fields).

• get_email(str) method for looking up e-mail addresses. Returns a list of dictionary objects. Each dictionary object has two keys: "name" and "email".

• The siteinfo attribute is a dictionary object which contains the responses parsed out of the "siteinfo" command.

Version 0.1

Original version.