[OpenAFS-devel] DRAFT: New sysname standard

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 2:03 PM -0400 5/7/01, Jim Rees wrote:
>   While it's easy to think of cool uses, I *really* do not want
>   to discuss support for arbitrary environment variables.  To my
>   mind, it brings up too many issues wrt security and performance,
>   and thus it scares me off.
>
>Pardon my obtuseness, but given that we already support one type
>of variant link, how does generalizing the mechanism compromise
>security or performance?  I might be opposed because of the
>complexity but I don't see the other issues.

The variant-link that we have (ie, @sys) is based on settings that
the system administrator sets, and is constant for all users on
that system.  I wouldn't mind more of those.

The proposed variant is based on environment variables, which
can be set by any user, and which (I assume) are not readily
available in the file-system code.

Mainly I'm afraid of the discussion more than the variables...
I think it's easier to convince people to add a few more @sys-like
variables than to add the tracking of arbitrary environment
variables.  The longer it takes to come to agreement, the less
likely anything will get decided, and we'll end up right where
we are -- trying to stuff several different bits of info into
the single @sys variable.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad@eclipse.acs.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad@freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih@rpi.edu