Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!uwmcsd1!ig!agate!ucbvax!MAILGW.CC.UMICH.EDU!rees From: rees@MAILGW.CC.UMICH.EDU (Jim Rees) Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo Subject: Re: some questions for the gurus. Message-ID: <8809051853.AA03917@mailgw.cc.umich.edu> Date: 5 Sep 88 18:55:16 GMT References: Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: rees@caen.engin.umich.edu (Jim Rees) Organization: The Internet Lines: 42 (1) can we prevent ordinary users from shutting down the system? No. I can always shut down the system by turning the power off, if no other means is available. If you require absolute physical security, go talk to IBM. (2) how do we prevent ordinary users to sigp other users' processes? This is "fixed" (assuming you consider current behavior to be broken) in sr10. (4) has anybody successfully make gcc and g++? The trick isn't getting gcc to work. That's easy, it just runs. The trick is running the resulting objects. I've got an a.out to coff converter that I'll send to anyone who is interested. It's still missing the ability to generate good relocs for external data references, and since most addresses appear in the text section, it won't work with dynamic binding (I bind KGT references at link time). But it actually works for simple cases. Of course it only helps if your Apollo runs coff (sr10 or later). I'd like to take this opportunity to flame a bit on the issue of "security." I don't give my car keys to someone I don't trust. And I don't give a computer account to someone I don't trust. I wouldn't ask a workstation manufacturer to prevent users from shutting the machine down for the same reason I don't ask Ford to prevent users from running my car over a cliff. I've heard the claim that things are different in an academic environment, that you can't expect students to exhibit responsible behavior. Well maybe I'm just an old fart, but I do expect that of students. Does the Music school lock down the tops of the grand pianos so the students won't cut the strings? I don't think so. A timesharing system is different. If you screw that up, you screw everyone. But workstations are supposed to put the power into individual people's hands. I think that's an important distinction. When you start treating your workstations as timesharing systems, you've taken power out of the hands of the people, and put it into the hands of the bureaucrats. I think that's bad. All of you users out there should be worried when people who run computer labs start asking how they can prevent users from shutting down the system. Let them know that's the wrong question to ask. -------