Subject: Re: Security 'n MOO 'n UNIX 'n stuff. (fwd)

From: [email-masked] (Michael Richardson)
Date: Thu, 7 May 1992 21:08:34 -0700

On May 7, 10:29pm, Clay Luther wrote:
} Ever heard of signals?  
} Ever heard of pipes?  
} Ever heard of sockets?  
} Ever heard of forking? 

  One thing comes to mind with forking --- a month or two ago there
was a debate in comp.unix.internals (I think) about how to invoke a
process without doing fork() -- the poster was worried that
duplicating his immense process space would take significant time.
Copy-On-Write was brought as the saviour, and then the poster
suggested that even setting all those region descriptors may take a
long time for a huge process.  MOO sounds like a good example :-)
  
} I know you have.  I have, too, and I can think up many wonderful incantations
} using these tools.

  I would be really curious as to *what* it is that you have in mind.

  A co-process might be created in a chroot'ed environment to act as a
process `server' --- open_network_connection() might be just what is
really needed here. (perhaps an option to use an AF_INET socket
instead thus guaranteeing security of this socket?)

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---

From: Clay Luther <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 8 May 1992 08:25:01 -0700

> long time for a huge process.  MOO sounds like a good example :-)

Yah, moo in it's current inception would be a terrible thing to fork, but I
am thinking towards Pavel's planned upgrade where the db is not stored in
memory.  Or, like I indicated, you might write a Moo-Unix-Gateway server that
sits on some socket (moosocket+1 would be good ;))  It waits for moo to open
a connection to it.  Almost like an rsh, of which you may find a fine example
in Stevens [Chapter 14].  

Sorry about the smoke in Moo cows.  I was just really annoyed.

-- 
Clay W. Luther                  [email-masked]
System Manager                  Center for Network Neuroscience
University of North Texas       PO Box 5218 Denton, Texas 76203
817/565-3896,3472               aka. Malraux@GodNet (Bushashuru!)