Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ukma!sean
From: sean@ms.uky.edu (Sean Casey)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: IRQ virus (and a personal note to Steve)
Message-ID: <10795@s.ms.uky.edu>
Date: 3 Jan 89 00:30:51 GMT
References: <5601@cbmvax.UUCP> <5602@cbmvax.UUCP> <10788@s.ms.uky.edu> <18668@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <3200@sugar.uu.net>
Reply-To: sean@ms.uky.edu (Sean Casey)
Organization: The Leaning Tower of Patterson Office @ The Univ. of KY
Lines: 41

In article <3200@sugar.uu.net> peter@sugar.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
|In article <10788@s.ms.uky.edu> sean@ms.uky.edu (Sean Casey) writes:
|>It's going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better. The biggest
|>light at the end of the tunnel is probably a protected mode OS with
|>enforced privileges. Once debugged, at this would at least protect the
|>system files from a user running a virus.

|This wouldn't be enough. You would also need multiuser protection, and you
|would need the USER to have enough discipline to not just sit in root all
|the time, as home-unix folks are wont to do.

I SAID a protected mode operating system. You know, like different memory maps
for each user so they can't clobber each other?

Anyone that sits in root all the time deserves whatever happens to
them. You have to be REALLY careful in root. For example, I found out
by accident that you don't type "kill -9 %1" and forget the percent
sign.  The only thing you should need a root shell for is installing
software.

|And when you'd done this, you'll have lost enough real-time
|performance that you might as well be running on a PC again.

Huh? Why do you say that? An '030 with MMU is certainly a lot faster
than a PC. As the processors get faster, the system overhead becomes a
smaller fraction of the available horsepower.

|Oh, for UNIX under AmigaDOS.

You know what I'd like to see? Parallel processors. One runs Unix, and
the other runs AmigaDOS, and they like know how to do lunch. You could
get a mergerDOS window from Unix, and a Unix X11 (or Open Look!) window
from AmigaDOS.  I think it would be an interesting solution over a
layered approach, and probably easier to implement.

Sean
-- 
***  Sean Casey                        sean@ms.uky.edu,  sean@ukma.bitnet
***  Who sometimes never learns.       {backbone site|rutgers|uunet}!ukma!sean
***  U of K, Lexington Kentucky, USA  ..where Christian movies are banned.
***  ``My name is father. You killed my die. Prepare to Inigo Montoya.''