Re: Removing user settings services

[Daniel Gnoutcheff <daniel gnoutcheff name>]

Thanks for the comments!

On 06/22/2010 04:28 AM, Ludwig Nussel wrote:
> I'm not sure the privileges need to be that fine grained as in your
> proposal though. Physical access to a system likely allows to
> terminate any connection anyways e.g. by unplugging the device or
> it's wire or by hitting the kill switch. So the different
> 'deactivate' types are kind of moot. I'd probably even declare that
> the 'activate' privilege covers the deactivate cases so the
> 'deactivate' privilege could be left out. A front-end could
> nevertheless warn the user if she tries to deactivate a connection
> of another, still logged in user of course.

Ah, excellent point! Yeah, remote users probably aren't going to want to
mess with network settings, so the only meaningful cases for connection
activation/deactivation are for local users, and well, yeah. WiFi
killswitch. 'Nuff said.

Thanks for setting me straight on that! This makes things much simpler.
I've updated the wiki page accordingly.


>> Do we want to have connections that are automatically deactivated when a user
>> logs out and/or locks their session? 
> 
> Terminating a connection on log out makes sense if it's charged per
> time at least, like plain old modem connections. That avoids having
> to accidentally pay for the connection while noone actually uses the
> computer.

Right, and it probably applies even more clearly to private VPN
connections, where the user really doesn't want to accidentally let
other users use the connection.

We handle this pretty well right now because when the user logs out,
that user's settings service goes away, and the connection disappears
with it. If we get rid of user settings, we'll need to do this some
other way.


Have a great one,
Daniel