At 10:12 PM +0200 8/23/99, Mark Murray wrote:
>Folk are all skirting around a very convenient (and necessary)
>loophole; in cases where there _is_ mandatory locking, there
>is always some meta-user which is allowed to violate this.
If we include non-unix systems in the discussion, this isn't
always true. In the mainframe OS that I used to work on, there was
no meta-user who could just ignore locks set by other processes.
The super-user could find which process had a file locked, and
kill that process (thus removing the lock). Or the super-user
could run a program which modified the in-core locking table
so the file did not appear to be locked.
However, ordinary programs run by that super user did not have
any magic power to ignore mandatory locks set by some other
process.
It is true that nobody is running that mainframe OS anymore... :-)
I'm just saying we COULD (and maybe "should"?) implement this
such that even root has to honor mandatory locks. Root (or some
thing) would have a way to get around or cancel the mandatory
lock, but "standard" programs run by root should not bypass the
mandatory locking. (IMO)
---
Garance Alistair Drosehn = [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Senior Systems Programmer or [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
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