From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Date: Sun,  3 Apr 1994 00:26:48 -0500
From: Vijay Gill vijay@gl.umbc.edu
Subject: Plan 9 vs. Adversary
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 019ff49e-eac8-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025
Message-ID: <19940403052648._sEh_noI87lq0jl0GtZQcth4DhTQSqkTkVGZMyqWIR8@z>


Somehow I've managed to convince people to set up a lab using plan 9 as 
the base system (plan 9 running on IBM PC Clones).  Now a couple of 
questions I can't answer yet (still waiting on CD).  

	1.  Is there a secure way to authenticate users? (last I read in 
	    plan 9 papers was that the authors planned to move to 
	    something like kerberos and I've been hearing things
	    about authentication servers.  Can anyone update me on this?
	    Also, the papers mention that there is no way for anyone
	    to read/delete files that the user in question has removed
	    permissions from.  This leads to a quick question? How do
	    we remove accounts from the system once a class is over?

	2.  Is there a way to enforce disk quotas?  I don't want some
	    malicious user filling up the entire disk and then pretending
	    that it was the output of an infinite loop writing out to 
	    disk and that they didn't know that it could do that, hence
	    could we have an extention on our project since the entire
	    class could not do any work?  This has happened before.

	3.  I have some more money coming in and looking at the new Sun
	    announcement, was wondering if there are any plans to support
	    the Sun Classics or Sparcstation 5's?

	4.  We have very many SGI Indigo and Indy machines just lying idle.
	    Any idea if plan 9 runs on the Indigo Boxes? I know that it runs
	    on the SGI Challenge XL's.  We have them, but my hope was that
	    Challenge's also imply support for Indigos ;)

	5.  Anyone use plan 9 as a general environment for classes?  If 
	    you do, would you mind sharing some tips/tricks?

    I have the official annoucement from Sun about their new workstations
(Sun Sparcstation 5 and 20's).  The Classic has been reduced to $3k and 
the new sparcstation 5 comes in at around $4k (with half a gig of disk, 
16 meg of ram, monitor et al, 70 mz uSparc-II).  If anyone is interested, 
I can mail it out individually.  It was also posted to 
comp.sys.sun.hardware. 

Sorry to be asking so many (to some, stupid) questions, but I get only 
one shot at making plan 9 a part of our environment and I've had to call 
in a lot of favors for this one.

--
Vijay Gill                         |The (paying) customer is always right.
wrath@cs.umbc.edu                  |                  - Piercarlo Grandi
vijay@gl.umbc.edu                  | Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get
These are my opinions only.        | sucked into jet engines.