[19685] in Athena Bugs
Re: serious PWOG problem with quick fix
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Hawkinson)
Wed Aug 22 11:30:42 2001
Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2001 11:30:38 -0400
From: John Hawkinson <jhawk@MIT.EDU>
To: "Aaron M. Ucko" <amu@MIT.EDU>
Cc: Jonathon Weiss <jweiss@MIT.EDU>, aurora@MIT.EDU, bugs@MIT.EDU,
source-developers@MIT.EDU
Message-ID: <20010822113038.I18075@multics.mit.edu>
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Aaron M. Ucko <amu@MIT.EDU> wrote on Wed, 22 Aug 2001
at 11:28:37 -0400 in <udlsnekp10a.fsf@multics.mit.edu>:
> > I think, after all these years, it would be a good idea to stop the
> > practice of having users edit the password file(s) by hand, and provide
> > a helper utility to deal with these cases.
>
> Why not simply recommend the use of /etc/athena/access instead?
/etc/athena/access is not a substitute for being in /etc/passwd.
Any move to change the recommendation should think carefully about
the differences. They effect:
Long-running processes on the machine
Whether things like "finger username@machine" work when
the user is not logged in
etc.
Perhaps those are not big deals.
So, I think the question of whether to use access instead of passwd
is orthogonal to whether we do a better job of telling users how to
modify passwd.
--jhawk
