Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!bionet!agate!helios.ee.lbl.gov!ace.ee.lbl.gov!leres
From: leres@ace.ee.lbl.gov (Craig Leres)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.headers
Subject: Re: administration fascism
Message-ID: <1818@helios.ee.lbl.gov>
Date: 1 Feb 89 05:01:14 GMT
References: <445@avsd.UUCP>
Sender: usenet@helios.ee.lbl.gov
Reply-To: leres@helios.ee.lbl.gov (Craig Leres)
Organization: Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Berkeley
Lines: 19

Several weeks ago, Richard Childers wrote:
> When I find .forward files in the LAN ... I cat /dev/null into them and
> chown them to root and chmod the sucker to 444 and that's that.

Shortly after, I wrote:
> This sounds gratuitously fascist to me. Luckly, it's not hard to remove
> such a file ...

More recently Richard Childers writes:
> But it is impossible to edit it until it is removed, and provokes the required
> dialogue between user and administrator ... which is all I ask.

When one of my users botches his/her .forward file (this is a rare
event, perhaps my users are smarter than yours) I find that mail(1)
provides an interface that is completely sufficient to "provoke"
dialogue with the user. Not once have I had to play power games with
superuser privileges to achieve this goal.

		Craig