From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2008 09:48:52 -0800 From: "Russ Cox" To: "Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs" <9fans@9fans.net> Subject: Re: [9fans] How to implement a moral equivalent of automounter in Plan9? In-Reply-To: <1FAD6133-18F8-444F-BD6E-795999DE3170@sun.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline References: <1FAD6133-18F8-444F-BD6E-795999DE3170@sun.com> Topicbox-Message-UUID: 551caade-ead4-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 The automounter is symptomatic of an ill that Plan 9 has cured. Since adding to the name space requires no special privileges, ordinary users can mount the servers they want to use directly, instead of needing a privileged daemon to guess their intent and mount servers on demand. In Plan 9, scripts that care to use a particular server simply put "9fs server" in their script. One could write a user-level server that interposes on exportfs, and if it sees a failed walk of "name" in the root, runs "9fs name" and resends the walk, but that could only work for a single user: in general, mounting requires authentication, so hiding the mounting requires hiding the authentication. This is easy if you're only worried about one user--just use that user's factotum--but not really possible when there are multiple users involved. In that case, automatic mounting takes control of authentication away from the users. Russ