[1530] in netbsd-help mailing list archive
Re: NetBSD/Athena
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Nathan J. Williams)
Wed Jun 25 18:20:30 2003
To: "Erik E. Fair" <fair@netbsd.org>
Cc: netbsd-help@MIT.EDU
From: nathanw@MIT.EDU (Nathan J. Williams)
Date: 25 Jun 2003 18:20:25 -0400
In-Reply-To: <23087.1056578317@cesium.clock.org>
"Erik E. Fair" <fair@netbsd.org> writes:
> Were the major changes required ever committed into the NetBSD
> Project source repository?
The Athena environment is mostly a set of userland applications and
some installation tools and system configuration management, targeted
at dataless workstations. Most of the "NetBSD-Athena" work was making
Athena run on NetBSD, not the other way around. The custom
installation and config management tools we used were very specific to
our site and circumstances and not generally useful to the
world. NetBSD-Athena ran a kernel that was configured essentially as
GENERIC minus non-IP networking and a couple of drivers that were
troublesome at the time.
Offhand, I can only think of one change that was useful, which was the
change in su to permit anyone to become root if the wheel group was
empty; previously, there was no "everyone can become root" mechanic
useful for a system where enumerating the users is hard. That was
contributed back by Greg Hudson many years ago.
The big piece that's missing now is AFS; at the time (in the NetBSD
1.0 to 1.5 timeframe) there was a port of AFS 3.3 (done by some people
at MIT, under MIT's AFS source license). AFS is now mostly
open-sourced (see openafs.org) but the port of AFS to NetBSD was not
maintained through later versions of either NetBSD or of AFS (up to
Transarc's 3.6, and now OpenAFS), which had pretty significant
restructurings.
- Nathan
