Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!novavax!twwells!bill
From: bill@twwells.uucp (T. William Wells)
Newsgroups: comp.bugs.sys5
Subject: Re: ulimit (was: getty/login for callback)
Message-ID: <870@twwells.uucp>
Date: 26 Apr 89 03:52:12 GMT
References: <836@twwells.uucp> <4428@ihuxz.ATT.COM>
Reply-To: bill@twwells.UUCP (T. William Wells)
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In article <4428@ihuxz.ATT.COM> burris@ihuxz.ATT.COM (Burris) writes:
: The ulimit has NOTHING to do with the assumption that users are stupid
: or malicious. It DOES however assume that people make mistakes. Do you
: know any programmer who has NEVER hacked up a quick program with an
: infinate loop?

Uh, buddy, have you been reading my postings? I didn't say a thing
about eliminating ulimit. What I said was that there is no good
reason for it to be privileged. The sysadmin should set the default
value to something reasonable and assume that users won't set it up
without need. If you have users who will set their ulimits
irrationally, you also have users who won't care about filling up
your disks with lots of little files. And in that case you need
something stronger than ulimit. Like quotas.

: If you had ever been an administrator in a software development
: environment you would see the demonstrated need for the ulimit.

Hey, fathead!

Now that I've returned your insults, can we talk rationally?

I've administered many different systems. On all those systems, the
most common disk-space problem I had was that people would not clean
up the files they were responsible for. The result? Sometimes half the
disk space was taken up by files of no value to anyone.

Ulimit wouldn't have fixed this. Ulimit, in the normal course, is
good for one thing only: preventing runaway programs from filling
your disks. And for that purpose, there is no point in making it
privileged.

---
Bill                            { uunet | novavax } !twwells!bill