So currently this is does two things:

1. allows passing options as a dict rather than a record
2. provides some default values for option lookups in the function

I get the convenience of (1), but otoh, it's not hard to wrap a dict in optparse.Values.
I'm worried somewhat worried about the inconsistencies of (2). Only some of the options lookups are given defaults, potentially making for ugly errors if the options passed in is missing something.

I'm also wondering it wouldn't be better to solve this another way.

otoh, maybe this is good as a stopgap measure....

Merging this with a small fix (don't assume runas in the ssl check either), and adding a unit test for activate_session.

Commit 9a1562fa fixes this pull-request