Flame Fest (Was Re: Project Athena ( was Re: Non Destructive Version of rm))

[Chris G. Demetriou]

In article <12975 at pt.cs.cmu.edu> ddean at rain.andrew.cmu.edu (Drew Dean) writes:

   In article <12049 at mentor.cc.purdue.edu> asg at sage.cc.purdue.edu (The Grand Master) writes:
   >We also have it here at GE where each person who has a workstation
   >can still log into anny workstation and be able to access his disk without
   >having to do mounting all over the place. If I want to get to a directory
   >/tmp on the system a294 I do cd //a294/tmp - no problem.
   Uh, guys --
	   From this description, I'd be willing to bet that GE has a network
   of Apollos.  Apollo has a network root concept, where each machine has its
   name as an entry in the // directory, which is above the local root directory.
   Several daemons (try) to keep this information consistent across the network.
   This appears to be a legacy of Aegis, Apollo's proprietary OS (before they
   merged it with Unix).  Aegis may or may not be a "good" OS; that's not at
   issue here.  It was built for distributed workstations, though, from the
   start.  I'd note that CMU RFS (not related at all to AT&T RFS) uses
   /.. in the same way.  In these types of remote filesystems, the mounts are
   implicit instead of explicit; again whether or not this is a good idea isn't
   relevant.

sorry i didn't read this before i posted the previous...

Apollos are interesting creatures...

if anyone can break *ANY* single account on those machines, they can
*EASILY* toast the entire network...

wanna know how?  rbak and wbak (especially old versions...) are great
for restoring Aegis suid files... (actually, if you write with an old
version of wbak, it doesn't *MATTER* what version of rbak you use...)

<sigh>

that, and there are millions of other ways to do stuff that most people
don't know about...

cgd