On 29.11.2014 20:46, erik quanstrom wrote: Hi,
>> So, how would a Plan9 solution for these usecases look like ? > > plan 9 doesn't pretend that the hostowner doesn't fully control the box, > so it doesn't attempt to prevent the hostowner from e.g. turning wireless > on and off. In my scenario, I'm (more precisely: the account I'm using) not the hostowner, just a plain user - in Unix terms: non-root). But that account has the special privileges of controlling the network connections. Other accounts may only choose from a predefined list of connections. The network itself is controlled by some separate service (eg. network manager - which eg. comes quite handy for travelers, etc). Now we need to decide which accounts may control it or just see some status. A traditional unix/linux approach (for local-only) would be handling that via groups and file permissions for the command sockets. The decision then would be done on login time, as the uids and gids are set here. For a plan9-alike approach, I could imagine something where the factotums handle everything, so the service finally just sees an pseudo-user or role, and the host-factotum does the translation, based on some table (similar to /etc/group). For the network-manager example, there could be roles like "network-admin", "network-ctrl", "network-stat". Maybe we could even extend the factotum protocol, so it directly supports roles. hmm, seems that all needs some deeper thoughts ... cu -- Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consulting +49-151-27565287
