Path: utzoo!hoptoad!amdcad!apple!desnoyer
From: desnoyer@Apple.COM (Peter Desnoyers)
Newsgroups: alt.next
Subject: Re: The NeXT Problem
Message-ID: <19081@apple.Apple.COM>
Date: 19 Oct 88 18:53:04 GMT
References: <26435@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <5498@juniper.uucp> <3884@encore.UUCP> <12844@oberon.USC.EDU>
Organization: Apple Computer Inc, Cupertino, CA
Lines: 18

In article <12844@oberon.USC.EDU> crum@lipari.usc.edu (Gary L. Crum) writes:
>
>Barry's environment where students boot cubes off their own platters
>poses many interesting security problems!  In such an environment, cubes
>cannot "trust" each other because users have their own system disks
>and hence all users are superusers for their respective machines.
>
In the MIT Athena system you walk up to a workstation, log in, and get
connected to your files, as well as the system, over the network. If you
screw up the workstation, I think you can look up the root password in
the documentation. Since any files of consequence (your files, system files)
are non-local although locally cached, root can't screw many things up.
root@<workstation> obviously isn't a trusted account in this environment.

In other words, these proposed clusters are a solved problem, as well as
being a good idea.

				Peter Desnoyers