[OpenAFS-devel] DRAFT: New sysname standard

[Derek Atkins]

No, the environment variable discussion was of historical interest.
It was a description of how Domain/OS worked.  Nobody (I hope)
believes that AFS should work that way.  All of my interpretation is
that @-variables are defined by the system administrator and would
work exactly how @sys works today, where the administrator sets the
variable in the system and all users of the system obtain the same
@-variable.

-derek

Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> writes:

> 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
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-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord@MIT.EDU                        PGP key available