FreeBSD support

Asio has now been tested successfully on FreeBSD 6.0, and should support FreeBSD 5.5 and later. FreeBSD 5.4 and earlier are not supported since, according to the man pages, getaddrinfo is not thread-safe.

SSL password callbacks

On the weekend I made some changes to asio to support password callbacks for SSL. There is a new function on the asio::ssl::context class called set_password_callback(), which takes a function object with the following signature:

std::string password_callback(
   std::size_t max_length,
   ssl::context::password_purpose purpose);

The callback must return the password as a string. The max_length argument indicates the maximum allowable length of the password, and if the returned string is longer it will be truncated. The context::password_purpose type is an enum with values for_reading and for_writing. In most cases you won't need to use the max_length or purpose arguments, and if you use boost::bind() to create the function object you can just leave them off. For example, the SSL server sample included with asio now has the following:

context_.set_password_callback(
    boost::bind(&server::get_password, this));

...

std::string get_password() const
{
  return "test";
}

The final thing to note is that the password callback needs to be set before calling any ssl::context functions that load keys, such as use_private_key_file().

What's this all about?

Greetings, reader. I have a blog. Now what? Well, the plan is to post ideas, tips and tricks, design thoughts, and anything else related to C++, Boost.Asio and programming that happens to take my interest.