On Tue, 5 Aug 2003 14:07, Dave Cotton wrote: > I joined a company 20 years ago who had totally solved the diverse > permission problems on the Altos unix machines they supplied to > customers to run their software. They had a shell script that did > chmod 777 on everything, solved the problem, perfectly.
I can introduce you to a vertical-market company on the other edge of Oz which does things like this right now today. For example, they overcome permission problems by running their database (and hence the application riding on it) as root. I shudder to think how many systems around Australia run like this. "Light blue touch-paper and retire to a safe distance." )-: I set up systems with their software, run the database as a user, and change the ownership on /dev/nst0 so that user can write to it, then set the database to write files into a directory writeable by same user, end of story, works better'n a bought one. The user I run the db as is _required_ during the installation of the db. The point in this case is: if the system that they started on had had a GUI tool which did as little as spot the removable device and offer to add users to the "disk" group so they could access it freely, this situation might not have happened. As it turns out, their favoured distro is Red Hat 7.1, despite the fact that it's obsolete (e.g. ext2 filesystems) and the db runs reliably and faster on the same machine under Mandrake 9.0. Cheers; Leon
