String uids for power and security

[Bob Goudreau]

In article <4110 at auspex.auspex.com> guy at auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris) writes:
>>The cheap solution is to just make UIDs 32 bits.  This is what was
>>done in AIX 3.1 (over the protestations of our dear friends at AT&T,
>>The Protectors Of The Holy Squid), and is now I understand being
>>done with V.4.
>
>It is, at least for all systems conforming to any of the ABIs defined
>for S5R4; UIDs, GIDs, process ID's, inumbers, "dev_t"s, "int"s (yes,
>"int"s, no ABI-conforming system can have "int"s shorter than 32 bits),
>link counts, and file modes ("st_mode" in the "stat" structure) must be
>32 bits or longer in any ABI-conforming system.

The M88000 Binary Compatability Standard (for systems based on
Motorola's 88k) also specifies uid_t, gid_t, pid_t, mode_t, dev_t, etc.
as 32-bit containers.  Note that the BCS is based on V.3, not V.4

It's unfortunate that the NFS protocol only allocates 16 bits for
device numbers.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Bob Goudreau				+1 919 248 6231
Data General Corporation
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