I just *had* to comment.

[Derek Martin]

On Wed, Jun 02, 2004 at 07:21:16PM +0000, dsr at tao.merseine.nu wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 03, 2004 at 04:11:06AM +0900, Derek Martin wrote:
> > > Anything subsequent is either O(1) for universal changes, O(#of groups
> > > affected), or related to hardware failure or handled by the help-desk.
> > 
> > Wrong, if you don't exclude Windows (which I wasn't).
> 
> I am, and thus I can delete the rest of a rather lengthy
> response.

That's fine, but you're ignoring a rather large reality where Windows
exists on 95% of the client machines in the world.  But as I said, it
doesn't matter, because your argument is still not correct for many
all-Unix environments, unless you want to more clearly define the
kinds of environments where it holds up.  Your assertion was that no
one would want the kind of environment like MIT has, but now you're
rather narrowly redefining who qualifies to make that decision...

Vis a vis:

  > dsr at tao.merseine.nu writes:                                                   
  > > What are you talking about?
  > 
  > A production environment where there is one class of machine
  > (dataless client) and all (well most) of the software lives on the
  > net.  Users can "attach" whatever software they wish, or they can
  > run it directly out of AFS.  But it's never "installed" on the
  > local machine.  All software configuration lives in AFS with the
  > software.                        
                                                                                
  Ah, MIT.
                                                                                
  MIT is always a special case, not the general case.
                                                                                
  -dsr-

I'm telling you that I worked in 4 environments that were set up not
exactly like, but similar to, what MIT did for basically the same
reasons, and you're ruling them out because they don't conform to your
very narrow idea of what an environment needs to be like.  That's 4
out of 4 environments that I worked in.  But no, none of them were all
Unix.

Whatever.

The idea is simple: the user should be able to log into any computer
and do the same work, no matter where it is.  We didn't use AFS or
athena, but we did use other network filesystems and authentication
schemes to approximate the same effect.  I think it's not a special
case at all.  [In practice, some of these environments varied from
this a little, but the data that existed on individual clients was
considered temporary and/or unimportant, and was not backed up in any
way by the sysadmin team. OTOH, some of these environments ran with
dumb terminals...]

And the point was that storing all configuration in a central registry
makes this really hard to achieve.  In many environments, that's an
inescapable fact.

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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