Re: [9fans] CGI

["Russ Cox" <rsc@plan9.bell-labs.com>]

In increasing order of complexity, I see four choices:

1. Make the file world writable (chmod 666).
Then anyone on your server can edit the file;
maybe you don't like that.

2. Make the file world writable but append-only,
restructuring your program so that it's okay that
the file is only appended to.  Then anyone on the
server can append to the file, but you can't lose
a previous state of the file.

3. Run the web server as alice through whatever
mechanism you like.  Then if a script kiddie hacks
it, he can pretend to be alice.

4. Write a file server to moderate access to B
so that the web server programs don't have to
be privileged and you can restrict the set of 
allowed operations as much as you want.

As an example, if I were particularly concerned,
I could run the wikifs as a special "wiki" user
and then the web server programs could still
interact with wikifs through the file system as none.
In fact, I'm not concerned, so I run the wikifs 
as none, and all the wiki data is chmod 666.

Russ