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

[Henry Mensch]

background:  i'm a former staff member of MIT's Project Athena and of
the Purdue University Computing Center, and am familiar with the styles
of computing available in both places.  i represent only my personal
opinion with this message, and do not represent the opinion of Project
Athena or the Institute.

asg at sage.cc.purdue.edu (The Grand Master) wrote: 
->jik at athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens) writes:
->asg at sage.cc.purdue.edu (The Grand Master) writes:
->}|> Are you telling me that when you log in, you have to wait for your home
->}|> directory to be mounted on the workstation you log in on?
->}  Yes.
->}|> - This is 
->}|> absolutely Horid!!

everyone out there who uses sun's automounter is doing exactly the same
thing (they are, of course, limited to the one networked file system
that is supported by the automounter).  it works quite well.  i suggest
you try it.

->The old Iidea that "it is a good idea if people put money into it" Remember
->the HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS SPENT ON PET ROCKS?? THe fact that money has been
->put into the project is not indicative of Project Athena's worthefullness.
->Ford put alot of money into the Edsel.

you seem to have missed the major point of that last paragraph, which
was the issue of industry acceptance of the athena model of distributed
computing.  the difference between the analogy you present and the
reality of project athena is that the edsel did not survive, while the
project athena network services are setting the standard and practice
for distributed computing now and for some years to come.

->You do not however have any more power (in fact quite a bit less) than systems
->which now occupy about the same volume as my desk.

consider this measure:  divide the number of MIPS that your
timesharing processor provides by the number of users  sharing that
processor.  apply the same measure to the workstation user (remember
that only one user uses a workstation at any one time).

now please reconsider your statement.

->You can have a large scale distributed environment without allowing
->people to mount their own directories. We have such at Purdue with the
->few centralized systems (yes, you can all sing along) with Xwindows
->terminals.

this is not a distributed computing environment.  replacing character
terminals with x terminals (did you know that the x window system came
from project athena and is an athena network service?) does not make a
distributed computing environment.

->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.

and how do you think //a294/tmp gets there?  magic?  maybe the
workstation *gasp* mounts a filesystem there for your use when you
make such a request.  maybe they're using an automounter?

->It is ALREADY WORKING! 

nobody said it wasn't working.  you didn't address jik's point that
this solution did not scale to hundreds of servers and thousands of
hosts.  i do believe you only have a handful of sequents at purdue ...

->Oh, I like your setup even better now. Give all the users root! 

you obviously don't understand that (with single user hosts) any user
can become root with little/no effort.  project athena's architecture
gets over this by making root (on a workstation) a commodity of
limited value.  our users don't get root privileges on servers (where
data are kept and network services originate from).

->... but tell me, if you dinna let your
->users have root privs would you NEED the elaborate authentication
->system?

see above.  you already use an authentication system; it's just fairly
weak and easy to exploit.  

->Oh, you do not support rlogin - ic.
->So tell me, how do I get at my files from a remote location?

you use a dialup server ... an exception (as jik described).  the name
"dialup server" is a misnomer--their most common usage is for users to
dial into with real modems and phone lines, but they are easily
accessible over the internet.

bruce, you might do well to have a chat with the manager of UNIX
systems at the computing center ... i know he has some clues about
athena-style computing that you seem to be missing, and perhaps he can
impart those to you in a way that you'll understand.  i know he knows
that not all of the athena solutions are useful for a place like PUCC,
but i also know that there's some understanding that you don't seem to
have ...

--
# Henry Mensch / Advanced Decision Systems / <henry at ads.com>