Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!ukma!david
From: david@ukma.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: NFS and many thousands of user-id's
Message-ID: <7605@g.ms.uky.edu>
Date: Sat, 31-Oct-87 12:18:18 EST
Article-I.D.: g.7605
Posted: Sat Oct 31 12:18:18 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 2-Nov-87 07:30:27 EST
Organization: U of Ky, Math. Sciences, Lexington KY
Lines: 29

We were brainstorming the other day and it seems likely that within
the next couple of years we could have lots of workstations on campus
(my guess is 500 within 2 years) that are diskless.  Then, we're
getting an IBM 3090 for the Computing Center, run UTX on it and
use disk space over there to support a lot of these workstations.

Then we realized we'd have to coordinate our user id's with them.

Then we realized there's only 16-bits of user id's available and we
could easily run out ...

Even if we don't use the above scenario of turning the 3090 into
a fileserver ... it seems likely that we will eventually have
a similar sort of situation with everybody on campus sharing
a global NFS file system (er.. at least, *most* everybody) and
we'd have to coordinate user-id's etc etc etc.  And the possibility
of running out of user-id's still remains.

(As does security problems like -- if you're root on one nfs machine
you can instantly become root on any other nfs machine -- professors
who're accustomed to students NOT being on these machines, so they
write their exams here ...)


-- 
<---- David Herron,  Local E-Mail Hack,  david@ms.uky.edu, david@ms.uky.csnet
<----                    {rutgers,uunet,cbosgd}!ukma!david, david@UKMA.BITNET
<---- "The market doesn't drop hundreds of points on a normal day..." --
<---- 		Fidelity Investments Corporation