It's been reported in GEODE-2247 that gfsh can connect in a secured environment without a username/password when using the --use-http flag. When using a jmx connection, this would immediately prompt for user/password.
In the http environment, the connection isn't any less secure. The moment one attempts to execute a command that an "anonymous user" cannot execute, they will receive a failure with a message informing them that the user (in this case anonymous) cannot execute that command. That's all fine and good, but the UX should probably be to fail instead on the 'connect' when in a secure environment. Opinions? The issue is that gfsh uses the 'ping' endpoint to determine connectivity, which is not secured. Moreover, it starts a connection poll, hitting that endpoint every 500ms to ensure the connection is still alive. I can't determine why it's doing this other than to try to wrap an artificial 'state' in to the stateless nature of REST. The only advantage I see is that if I kill my server, gfsh knows right away that it's been disconnected from it. I have not yet determined whether or not the socket stays open through all of this. I suspect that it does or otherwise I'd see a lot of FIN_WAIT entries in my netstat results. One possible solution to this is to implement security in the endpoint. But ShellCommandsContoller.java doesn't have any security in it. Security is handled further downstream.
