Re: Blocking Access

["Guillermo S. Romero / Familia Romero" <famrom idecnet com>]

deedsmis aculink net (2001-03-31 at 1817.25 -0700):
> > boss is dictator", ie), vs freedom. Please share the reason.
> Examples:
> I've seen people get A's in Psychology and D's in computer classes. 

Sorry, what is good mark and what bad? Where I live we use other
rating systems, so A and D mean nothing to me. Are they better in
computer or in psychology? In any case, anybody can fuck things, on
purpose or by accident, but the severity of the damages is
proportional of how correctly the system is administered.

> People of this caliber always advance into and take advantage of
> things that have too many options; ergo, these people lock the system

Take aventage? In the good (be more confortable) or bad meaning (cause
problems to people arround)? Or is some kind of irony ("he learned how
to hang things with a rope, testing with his neck")?

> up, remove a host of things that make operations impossible, overload
> the system with things that boggle the operations, or take out things
> that require reinstallations.

I dunno how can an user do admin tasks, like uninstalling things or
damaging global config, without been admin or cracking into the
machine. In both cases, kick him, one for bad work and the other for
illegal operations.

The only things a normal user can do is damage his own config, which
can be recovered from backups or reset to default by nuking the
damaged one so next time he will get default one; or try to hoard
resources, but that is not a job for GNOME, but a wise use of quotas
(disk, priorities, ram, etc) which any admin of a multiuser systems
should know.

> Consequences:
> I don't want those things to happen, because guess who has to fix
> them? It's a waste of my time and a lot of downtime.  I could be
> doing something more productive.

I have done that job and know people that still does it. Due it I
learned why quota, ulimit, pam and other tools exists. As well as
practicing scripting, to automatice things, and "seargent talks", cos
they are the only way to try to change people (if talk does not work,
then better forget about her, denning any access to the systems).

> If options were available by choice to lockout users by
> administration changing a setting, allowed things to happen, but
> reloaded the defaults when X is reloaded or allowed users into
> certain areas by giving permissions -- it would make my life a lot
> easier.

When you need to fix someone's config, "rm -rf USERHOME/.gnome*
USERHOME/.sawfish*" as root, and solved (OK, maybe I forget some dirs,
probably some of the /tmp/ dirs, ie). Of course, if he is smart, he
can try to recover his own config.

The permissions thing, as someone said: do not give her the root
password, and she will only poke into her own files, reducing problem
to personal config and a good use of resource limits.

Conclusion: admin a multiuser system is not easy and GNOME is not
going to solve it, it can help, but it is not a human. Its seems to be
the trend in computing, but it just a big bubble, complex things need
learning, and this is one. Without relation to if the system looks
cool or ugly, you have to know what is going on under the cover, at
least a bit.

BTW, you English is native or not? Cos mine is not and I am having
problems with some of your phrases, so you write too bad or too good.

GSR