# Building and Using Cyrus SASL on OS/390

Cyrus SASLv2 can be made to build on OS/390 with some minimal changes. Here are the suggestions provided by Howard Chu of the OpenLDAP project.

Cyrus SASL must be compiled in ASCII mode. This can be accomplished with a special invocation of c89. For ease of use, you can use a shell script (“acc” is a good name) and set the environment variable CC = acc before configuring anything. The shell script is simple:

    #! /bin/sh
    exec /bin/c89 -Wc,CONVLIT\(ISO8859-1\) -Wc,LANGLVL\(EXTENDED\) -D__LIBASCII $*

To build the source, you’ll need to set these environment variables, at a minimum:

    _C89_CCMODE=1
    CC=acc
    CPP="c89 -E"
    LD=c89
    CPPFLAGS=-D_ALL_SOURCE

That should allow you to run configure and get a coherent build environment. Before you type “make” from the top level though, do this:

    cd include
    make CC=c89

In the include directory is a small program that generates an md5global.h header file. This file must be generated in native EBCDIC. If you just typed make from the top level, the program and header file would be generated in ASCII, with an ASCII filename, which would be very confusing and not very useful.

In my initial tests I was able to use SASL/EXTERNAL to perform X.509-based authentication with slapd. I have subsequently tested the DIGEST-MD5 mechanism, using OpenLDAP’s slapd for storage of the secrets. It worked without any trouble. Note, I configured sasl –with-dblib=none to prevent it from trying to use its own sasldb. This is simply because I haven’t had the time to fix the EBCDIC/ASCII dependencies in the rest of the SASL library. Run as-is with a real database backend, the sasldb would try to create ASCII-named database files, which would be very unpleasant. The required fixes are trivial, but they are also numerous, and it is a very time-consuming task to track down all the dependencies.

Note that this minimal-effort port of SASL will probably only work in the context of OpenLDAP (though it may work with other special-case auxprop plugins).

No effort has been made to fix the ASCII filenames in the library, this SASL library will be unable to create/parse/handle native config files or database files. This is why I’ve only tested it using secrets stored in slapd, and why I only tried SASL/EXTERNAL at first. (EXTERNAL has no config parameters, and is part of libsasl2 itself, so it doesn’t need to be dynamically loaded from anywhere.)