SemiOT: filePro on FreeBSD chown gotcha

[Bill Vermillion]

On Tue, Jun 22, 2004 at 12:57:02PM -0400, Fairlight thus spoke:
> Is it just me, or did Jay Ashworth say:
> > On Tue, Jun 22, 2004 at 12:04:13PM -0400, Walter Vaughan wrote:
> > > <quote>

> > > The ownership of a file may only be altered by a super-user
> > > for obvious security reasons. </quote>

> > Yeah, right.

> > It's for "university students can't avoid file quotas" reasons.

> Agreed. Whether someone considers quotas part of the security
> subsystem is a questionable point. Some might consider
> workarounds to exceed quotas "unauthorised use".

That is not all the reasons you use quotas.  When a local community
collge had me maintaining a small herd of Xenix machines - most
with filePro and Lex for a WordProcessor and some obscure
spreadsheet, after one system died I instituted quotas for the
users.

They were more than generous, but the Unix spreadsheets had
capacities that Lotus could only dream of.  A typo when one person
was building one led to that spreadsheet expanding to take up all
the space on the hard driver and no one could evne log in.

Quotas are useful if applied correctly.  It seems the standard
argument I always here 'is to control the students use' - but
do consider there are other legitmate reasons.

You could contrain the LP daemon also so that a mistake in a job
doesn't kill a machine.  I had to fix one that did not have quotas,
as the person generating the report mis-type a start date, and the
report used up all available space on the machine before it crashed
the machine.

Bill

-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com