Re: GNOME Usability Improvements - Fix the window manager!

[sungod <sungod atdot org>]

Tom Gilbert (gilbertt@tomgilbert.freeserve.co.uk)'s email of 08/06/99 
13:15 said:

>> Gnome-ppp could ask the user for the root password first.
>> Less dangerous than a newbie doing a su and fiddling with files in /etc.
>
>And so users who are not admins cannot use it???
>
>Don't forget, not all systems are single-user systems, where the user has
>access to the root account.

You simply CANNOT get around the fact that when you toss this variable 
into the mix, the system administrator WILL have to learn something about 
system administration at this point.

If I were paying hourly for internet access through a PPP provider (as I 
do in Japan), I would not want my users to be able to dial up my ISP 
without my explicit permission.

I did, in fact, run a dial-up workstation on which three people were 
authorized to use my internet account, and three others had their own 
settings and scripts to access their own accounts. This was done through 
scripting pppd to use different chat-scripts with different permissions. 
Each was able to use "modem-lights" or some other GUI utility to control 
their dialup access, simply by referencing the correct bash script.

How would you handle a mixed-permissions scenario like this within GNOME? 
Not with any tools less flexible than pppd and bash, that's for sure. You 
can do it with a GUI, true, but it'll still be more complicated than 
GNOME-ppp ought to be, and will still have a learning curve. The 
graphical tool to do this (if anyone feels like coding it) should be 
powerful and flexible, and kept well separate from the basic one-user 
dialup tool. It should also make your configurations available from 
environments other than GNOME, including a shell prompt. It should, in 
short, essentially be a glorified pppd script editor, as a best-case 
scenario.:) GNOME-ppp, on the other hand, probably shouldn't be targeted 
to fill this role (and if it is, there should be another separate dialer 
to handle the simpler tasks).

My two yen...

-- 
"True riches only increase." -R. Buckminster Fuller
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