From: "Thomas Paulsen" <thomas.paulsen@firemail.de>
To: "Clem Cole" <clemc@ccc.com>
Cc: tuhs@tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Additional groups and additional directory permissions
Date: Fri, 02 Aug 2019 21:00:12 +0200 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <76a8b8144de199f3ef3234fae998566e@firemail.de> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAC20D2PwOxA4LGo+YFt7dLy1kmaQq_cnptYuy8Ajd6ajBqFcPg@mail.gmail.com>
isn't Kirk McKusic a member of our group? Guess he can contribute a lot on this issue.
--- Ursprüngliche Nachricht ---
Von: Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com>
Datum: 02.08.2019 15:28:18
An: Aharon Robbins <arnold@skeeve.com>, Doug McIlroy <doug@cs.dartmouth.edu>
Betreff: Re: [TUHS] Additional groups and additional directory permissions
> The best I can tell/remember is that groups went through 4 phases:
> 1.) No groups (earliest UNIX) [ I personally never used this except in the
>
> V0 retrocomputing]
> 2.) First group implementation (Thompson) [My first UNIX introduction was
>
> with this implementation]
> 3.) PWB 1.0 (Mashey version) [then saw this post PWB]
> 4.) BSD 4.2 (wnj version) [and lived this transistion]
>
> Each was a little different in semantics.
>
> As Doug mentioned, many sites (like Research) really did not need much and
>
> groups were really not used that widely. Thompson added something like
>
> the Project number of TOPS and some earlier systems. Truth is, it did not
>
> help much IMO. It was useful for grouping things like the binaries and
>
> keeping some more privileged programs from having to be setuid root.
>
> Mashey added features in PWB, primarily because of the RJE/Front end to the
>
> Mainframes and the need to have better protections/collections of certain
>
> items. But they still were much more like the DEC PPN, were you were
> running as a single group (i.e. the tuple UID/GID). This lasted a pretty
>
> long time, as it worked reasonably well for larger academic systems, where
>
> you had a user and were assigned a group, say for a course or class, you
>
> might be talking. If you looked at big 4.1 BSN Vaxen like at Purdue/Penn
>
> State, *etc.*, that how they were admin'd. But as Doug said, if you were
>
> still a small site, the use of groups was still pretty shallow.
>
> But, as part of the CSRG support for DARPA, there was a push from the
> community to have a list of groups that a user could be a part and you
> carried that list around in a more general manner. The big sites, in
> particular, were pushing for this because they were using groups as a major
>
> feature. wnj implemented same and it would go out widely in 4.2, although
>
> >>by memory<< that was in 4.1B or 4.1C first. It's possible
> Robert Elz
> may have brought that to Bill with his quota changes, but frankly I've
> forgotten. There was a lot of work being done to the FS at that point,
>
> much less Kirk's rewrite.
>
> But as UNIX went back to workstations, the need for a more general group
>
> system dropped away until the advent widely used distributed file systems
>
> like CMU's AFS and Sun's NFS. Then the concept of a user being in more
> than one group became much more de rigeur even on a small machine.
>
> Clem
>
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2019-08-02 19:00 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 17+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2019-08-01 12:35 [TUHS] Who's behind the UNIX filesystem permission Doug McIlroy
2019-08-01 16:22 ` John P. Linderman
2019-08-01 16:35 ` Arthur Krewat
2019-08-02 8:35 ` [TUHS] Additional groups and additional directory permissions arnold
2019-08-02 11:18 ` Tony Finch
2019-08-04 6:40 ` arnold
2019-08-02 12:45 ` Arthur Krewat
2019-08-02 13:06 ` Clem Cole
2019-08-02 13:28 ` Clem Cole
2019-08-02 19:00 ` Thomas Paulsen [this message]
2019-08-01 17:01 ` [TUHS] Who's behind the UNIX filesystem permission Nemo Nusquam
2019-08-01 18:26 ` Arthur Krewat
2019-08-01 20:14 ` Lyndon Nerenberg
2019-08-01 21:23 ` Dave Horsfall
2019-08-02 19:44 [TUHS] Additional groups and additional directory permissions Norman Wilson
2019-08-10 4:02 Kirk McKusick
2019-08-10 6:02 ` Thomas Paulsen
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