Who's in charge here: Oracle or Unix?

[Bill Meahan]

In article <237 at raysnec.UUCP> shwake at raysnec.UUCP (Ray Shwake) writes:
>gbarnet at uswnvg.UUCP (Gary Barnette) writes:
>>Request for open discussion:
>
>>There has been a battle going on around here on administrating
>>some of the system flat files associated with Unix. The file of concern
>>are /etc/passwd, /etc/group, /etc/hosts, and some configuration files 
>>used by a menuing system. 
>
>	Well, I cast my vote strongly with the SA staff - and not just
>because I've spent much of my UN!X career as an administrator. For years
>I've blasted programs that usurp system priviledge without cause, and
>even cast a few words about programmers who are too lazy to work out a
>proper permission strategy. (Some guidelines for programmers in this
>regard can be found in _Unix_System_Security_ by Wood and Kochan.)
>
>-----------  
>uunet!media!ka3ovk!raysnec!shwake				shwake at rsxtech

I agree wholeheartedly.

Have the Oracle-heads considered how they are going to handle passwords?
What happens if a user changes his/her password using 'passwd' (whether
or not they are "supposed" to).?  Will the new password be incorporated
into ORACLE?  Or will a change in ORACLE exported shortly after the user
has made a change overwrite the change when overwriting the file?  What
if password aging is in effect and forces the user to change passwords
using 'passwd'?

Passwords control is >>far from the only<< issue but is sufficiently
illustrative to show the dangers of the "ORACLE IS TRUTH" approach.


Bet IBM doesn't keep VM passwords in DB2 (or do they?)!
-- 
Bill Meahan			|Product Design & Testing Section
Production Test Engineer	|Starter Motor Engineering
wwm at pmsmam			| +1 313 484 9320