[9fans] group organization

[Kenji Arisawa arisawa@vega.aichi-u.ac.jp]

Hello 9fans!

>From: David Butler <gdb@dbSystems.com>

>I've been thinking of how to allow network access to the file server
>besides the "connect a serial cable to a cpu server and use consolefs".
>Perhaps a file like /adm/cons which provides read/write access to the
>console thread.  Then you put users in the adm group with read/write
>group perms on /adm/cons to get to it.  Comments?

That may be a good idea. I will try it.

By the way, I have another question on the group organization.
Plan9 forbids:
    chgrp group file ...
to the group the user does not belong to.
I cannot understand this restriction.
What problem does it make if plan9 admits:
    chgrp anygroup file ...

Here is an example that shows this effect.
Let /adm/users be
    alice:alice
    bob:bob:
    david:david:
and david be a professional programmer who is advising both alice and bob.
Assume alice doesn't want to be read her file to bob and
bob also doesn't want to be read his file to alice.
Then if alice and bob could execute respectively,
    alice% chgrp david herfile; chmod 640 herfile
    bob% chgrp david hisfile; chmod 640 hisfile
everything would go well!


Kenji Arisawa
E-mail: arisawa@aichi-u.ac.jp