From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <3E4D2482.3020204@nas.com> From: Jack Johnson User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.2a) Gecko/20020910 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] fs administration: how do people update multi-user fs? References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2003 09:16:50 -0800 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 5ff303ee-eacb-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 Ronald G. Minnich wrote: > A few things I've noticed in recent years, esp. on Linux > - you need to be root more than you used to > - more priveleged ports, not less I know this is off-topic for this list, but would you be willing to elaborate a bit? I agree with you in the other areas, but it seems that we're trading services, not necessarily adding services. SSH for telnet and ftp, so yes, maybe setuid-root, but we add a privileged port and drop two. We might add Samba or netatalk to a system that already has NFS shares, but the reasons they're privileged ports seem to be outside the hands of the Linux community, and most of the added privileged ports seem to be running as unique users now, instead of all running as root. It also seems like increased usage of chrooted/jailed services has made things slightly better, even though it's still privileged, and yes, still a mess. Are there better ways? Sure, but you're not likely to see them widely implemented anytime soon. As long as Linux continues to accrete functionality to accomodate Someone Else's OS the prevalent services will always be less than desired, but I don't see it as any worse than it was five years ago, just more of the same. I'm always suprised that there isn't more prevalent bootstrapping going on in the client world for halfway decent services. I wouldn't mind seeing an SFS client for Windows, or heck, even Java. Though I think OSX will let you have WebDAV home directories now, there should be some facility for arbitrary-service-home-directory for PAM. (Is the 9P on Python project still in existence?) -Jack