On 7/24/07, Justin C. Walker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote > On Jul 24, 2007, at 19:09 , William Stein wrote: > > > > > On 7/24/07, Justin C. Walker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> I was not paying attention when the notebook design was being > >> discussed, so I was surprised to see that starting it up requires an > >> "enabled" root login. On Mac OS X, this is generally discouraged, > >> and is not the default. > > > > The notebook can be run in both secure (https) and insecure mode. > > When run in insecure mode, you > > run as a user called "root", and things are pretty much like they were > > before with the old version of the notebook. > > OK; I read the output from 'notebook?' and I have a little better > understanding of the situation (and yes, I should have done that > first; mea maxima culpa (mea sage culpa?)).
No, it's fine. I'm just glad you got the ball rolling on this discussion. > > What is disconcerting? I.e., what alternative would you like? > > The Mac OS X user has been (or should have been :-}) indoctrinated in > the idea that 'root' is a Unix-ism that is useful in the hands of > experts, but that should not be trifled with. The system ships with > the user "root" known, but with no "account" supporting a login by > "root". > > After a brief look at the source, it's still not clear. Are these > accounts distinct from the "/etc/passwd" accounts of Unix fame? In > particular, is 'root' the Unix 'root'? To be clear, there is absolutely no relationship between user accounts on OS X and the SAGE notebook. The SAGE notebook logins and crypto hashed passwords are stored in the nb.sobj in the sage_notebook folder. Would calling the account "admin" instead of "root" be helpful? Basically an account with such privileges should probably exist, and it needs to be called something. > > I would be very happy if some people including you would read the > > output of notebook?, understand how the current model works, and > > propose > > some alternatives. Basically the user model that we worked out at SD4 > > was only one of the many usage cases, i.e., the one for the public > > notebook server. > > I will spend some time looking it over. Thanks. I'm not at all opposed to changing what's there -- I'm sure nobody's got too used to it already, since it's only been out there for a few days. William --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-forum URLs: http://sage.math.washington.edu/sage/ and http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
