Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 07:49:52 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: des@ofug.org (Dag-Erling Smorgrav) Cc: blk@skynet.be (Brad Knowles), siegbert.baude@gmx.de (Siegbert Baude), questions@FreeBSD.ORG, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Pulse poll at Borland Message-ID: <200009270749.AAA20729@usr05.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <xzpk8bygugf.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no> from "Dag-Erling Smorgrav" at Sep 27, 2000 09:33:36 AM
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DES wrote: > Brad Knowles <blk@skynet.be> writes: > > Me, I'll vote for BeOS. From everything I've heard, we would be > > far better off without them, and I'll be happy if they waste their > > time on a totally dead-end OS like that. > > I wouldn't call BeOS a dead-end OS. It suffers from dead-end > marketing, but it's actually a very nice desktop/multimedia OS. I have a very low developer registration number for BeOS, similar to my low number for NeXT and Macintosh. BeOS has its uses, but it is not a good network client, since it does not establish credentials at login, and then associate them with processes as they are started. Windows95 had a minor version of this failing, in that, at the login screen, you could do a ctrl-alt-esc, select "run" and run "explorer", and get in without providing a credential to the OS. You can get around this problem in Windows by providing a pseudo network provider, hooking the (undocumented) password provider interface (there are 3 manifest constants that I reverse engineered, and Microsoft wanted $2500 to document for me, which you need to do this), and making login be mandatory. There is no similar method of forcing the user to provide a credential in BeOS, unfortuantely, or I would have written SMB and AppleTalk clients (and maybe NetWare, since clients are infinitely easier than servers). For the same reason, until the SMB protocol after LANMAN2, it was not possible to ship per user credentials from a UNIX client over a single connection (1 session = 1 credential for all UNIX users), so it was not worthwhile pursuing an SMB desktop client FS under UNIX. As it is, NetWare for UNIX Client (NUC) was barely able to support this on UnixWare, and then only because UnixWare had a GUI, and could therefore support a session manager that could asynchronously pop up a credential request from the kernel when a user space access attempt first occured on a network volume. FreeBSD does not have similar capability, unless you force users to perform preauthentication, cache passwords (ala Windows95), or run a session manager, and force users onto the console (where screen memory can be manipulated to provide a pop up) or into X windows. Until this is fixed, BeOS will not be a good client OS, and it will not be a good Internet appliance OS (unless you are willing to run all appliance services in the same portection domain, and do all user-based credential enforcement in each and every one of your server implementations. All that said, I am a huge fan, and hope they fix the problem, and are very successful, going forward. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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