Re: hurd does NOT need /hurd
On Wed, May 22, 2002 at 05:32:10PM +0200, Tobin Fricke wrote:
>
>
> I think your idea that a GNU System shouldn't allow the sysadmin to limit
> the freedoms of the users is pretty ridiculous. After all, it's the
> sysadmin who owns the machine, pays for the network connection, is
> responsible for network traffic originating at the machine, etc...
> Certainly if a sysadmin WANTED to give users free reign of the machine,
> that's fine... but they're certainly under no obligation to do so.
The sysadmin will likely be able to limit reasonable things like network
bandwidth and disk space (although those limitations need to be implemented
on a lower level)
However, unreasonable things like mounting your own local/remote filesystems
won't have any restrictions. It has always been done in UN*X but only for
technical reasons, but there's no other point into disallowing users to
mount a filesystem for example. Security is not compromised, you're just
modifiying a file/device you have access to.
If the sysadmin doesn't want you to modify the root filesystem (as usual ;),
just set /dev/hd0s2 permissions to 600. Or he/she could want to allow
reading to the root group, then set it to 640. Limitations are where you
want them to be, they just need to be implemented in the kernel AFAIK
(normal users can't set a storeio translator for hd0s2)
But if you're a user and want to build a filesystem image for redistribution,
there's no reason for the admin to stop you on that. In fact it's impossible
to stop you, because you can write a userspace utility that does the necessary
modifications, or you could even take components from the Hurd to accomplish
that, and run them as normal user on top of GNU/Linux.
In that sense the Hurd doesn't take limitations away, it just provides you
with tools that override some practical limitations that can't be strictly
considered as such.
cheers,
--
Robert Millan
"5 years from now everyone will be running
free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5"
Andrew S. Tanenbaum, 30 Jan 1992
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