Re: [9fans] Attach/Auth

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

> Hm.  I replaced the allocfid() with lookupfid(), plus the change you
> mentioned, because afid is already allocated in Tauth (did I really
> put Tauth up there?  I meant Tattach!).

Oh, right.  Fixed.

> > Goes to show that we've never actually used authentication, I suppose.

> That's perfectly reasonable, as long as somebody eventually irons out
> the creases :-)

The reason that we've never actually used authentication is that most
user-level file servers don't need to authenticate.  They post files
that are mode 0600 in srv (or don't post at all) and mount into the
namespace directly.  Thus, by default the kernel will make sure that
only you can get at the file server.  You don't need to protect it
further.  Kfs only needs to deal with authentication because it can
listen to the network, speaking 9P with arbitrary clients rather than
just with the kernel.  For what you're doing, it doesn't sound like you
need authentication.

It also sounds like you should just use upas/fs.  Given a message you
can just do:

	{
		echo 'From xxx' `{date}
		sed '/^$/,$ s/^From / From /'
		echo
	} >$TMP
	upas/fs -f $TMP

Anyhow, I just fixed the various bugs you pointed out in the manual pages.
Let me know about any incompletenesses.

Of course, it's impossible to write documentation without noticing
unnecessary complications in the implementation, so the library itself
has been slightly stirred around as well, to be easier to explain.
No programs should need to change unless they're relying on very subtle
implementation details (and even I don't have such programs).

/sys/src/lib9p/ramfs.c is now in the distribution.  Sorry about forgetting
it earlier.

Russ