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Re: permissions. ACLs? groups?



Greetings

The following might very well be absurd, I was daydreaming.

When one allows users to create new groups within their own name space, 
wouldn't a logical next step to be to let users create their own users within 
their own name space (and within their own "permission space").

For example I am user "user_a" on some box and I want to share this account 
with a friend of mine, but I do not want him to know my password and I want 
to restrict access to some personal files. Then I should be able to create a 
user "user_a:user_b" (I would be "user_a:root" myself), with his own 
password, and grant him some of the permissions that I was granted by "root", 
so I grant him to execute programs and access to a subdirectory of my homedir 
while I restrict access to some other subdirectory and my mail account. 

Of course a user could never grant permissions he doesn't have himself, only 
subsets of his own rights. Also there could be somekind of "admin" 
permissions, the permission to create ones own users (and/or groups) and the 
permission to edit certain groups or users. This would mean a 
decentralisation of the tyrannic power of "root". It would be very expandable 
for systems with a large amount of users all trying to cooperate with some 
other users, and all managing files for their various project groups.
It could also be easily expanded to some kind of distrubuted system.

I have no idea about the technical implementation of a permissions scheme, but 
a can envision a user having his own auth server which is slave to the 
systems root auth server. It seems hurdish to me to give a user as much 
freedom as possible without damaging the system.

If this is really absurd, just treat me as a lunatic :)
Jaap

-- 
fortune says: 
Ten years of rejection slips is nature's way of telling you to stop writing.
		-- R. Geis
--
from: Jaap Karssenberg || Pardus [Larus]
mailto:j.g.karssenberg@student.utwente.nl
msn:pardus_larus@hotmail.com icq:89468200
http://pardus-larus.student.utwente.nl



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