Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!apple!bionet!ig!agate!pasteur!ames!elroy!jplopto!dave From: dave@jplopto.uucp (Dave Hayes) Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo Subject: Re: some questions for the gurus. Message-ID: <9136@elroy.Jpl.Nasa.Gov> Date: 6 Sep 88 23:32:20 GMT References: <8809051853.AA03917@mailgw.cc.umich.edu> Sender: news@elroy.Jpl.Nasa.Gov Reply-To: dave@jplopto.UUCP (Dave Hayes) Organization: Jet Propulsion Lab, Pasadena, CA Lines: 43 > 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. Well what do you have to say about the soon-to-be-released capability (I believe it's NCS) to distribute large computing jobs over large APOLLO networks? This amounts to timesharing. Another thing, I used to have to deal with a user that did the following via automatic script: $ crp -on //some_node -me Connected to node XXXX "//some_node" $ ppri -lo 16 -hi 16 $ sigp ?* -stop -qa No joke, this guy's excuse was that he needed extra node(s) to do compilation! > I'd like to take this opportunity to flame a bit on the issue of "security." Well I would too. In *ANY* multi-user environment where there are a set of computer resources distributed among several colleagues, there must be some sort of control and/or arbitration of the allocation of these resources to the users. This is the job of the systems administrator, who must resolve conflicts and keep the system up and running for _everyone_. If you are lucky enough to have a single stand-alone workstation per user, then you need not worry about security. As soon as you get more than three users competing for the same resources, then someone has got to be able to enforce a resource allocation policy for those users. System security is the prefferred method of enforcement (management does not take kindly to baseball bats!) of these policies. Yes, it can get very bureaucratic. But would you rather have nobody get work done because one of the many users of your system got so frustrated that he wrote a worm which hops from node to node killing processes that don't match his SID? Furthermore, would you leave your $10,000 applications software with world delete privileges? Even more to the point, would you let some random user (who maybe has just installed some hot new software package that requires a reboot to get started) even have the ability to shutdown *your* node while your 10 hour simulation run was in progress? All flame aside, I used to think like you. That is, until I was put on the other side of the fence..... ------===<<<(Dave Hayes)>>>===------ dave%jplopto@jpl-mil.jpl.nasa.gov {cit-vax,ames}!elroy!jplopto!dave