Date: Tue, 30 Sep 1997 01:15:55 +0200 From: Peter Korsten <peter@grendel.IAEhv.nl> To: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Microsoft brainrot (was: r-cmds and DNS and /etc/host.conf) Message-ID: <19970930011555.61645@grendel.IAEhv.nl> In-Reply-To: <199709291521.AAA00645@word.smith.net.au>; from Mike Smith on Tue, Sep 30, 1997 at 12:50:59AM %2B0930 References: <199709290600.AAA22484@obie.softweyr.ml.org> <199709291521.AAA00645@word.smith.net.au>
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Mike Smith shared with us: > > If we're trying to convince people to put a FreeBSD based server into > > their existing Win95 (or Mac, or whatever) environment, what better > > configuration vehicle can we give them, than the machine already on > > their desktop? > > Wes: Stop Right Here. > > If you can come up with a security model that makes this viable on an > adequately large scale, I will *happily* abandon almost any other > thought I might have of using any other interface and happily work > under a browser. > > If not, and I'm not convinced one way or another, then we have to give > this idea the wide berth it will deserve. In that case, this idea isn't the only thing that's going to be ditched... Because you have to be the equivalent of God on Unix to get some administrating done (and don't disagree with me on that one, we all know that only root should do a 'make world'), doesn't make the idea of a browser interface a bad one. (Note that on NT, you don't have to be God, but you still have to be the Messiah. God lives in Redmond and has glasses.) I bet that there's some kind of authorization process imaginable, with one-time keys and such stuff. The thing I have in mind, is a server-based page-interpreter like Active Server Pages (I'm writing one during office hours) that talks to an ODBC data source. Actually, this is a very general approach that can be put to other uses. You need far less CGI programming, once you have such a tool, that's why I'm writing one. I know that there are already such applications, also for FreeBSD. I'm just convinced that I'm better at it. The ODBC data source would be a daemon, running as UID 0, that administers the various files in /etc and elsewhere, showing itself as some kind of database - which the collection of scattered files really is, actually. So what we need is said daemon, which should also work over networks, plus a collection of 'extended HTML' files. No big deal, right? - Peter
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