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To: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
Cc: Andreas Gruenbacher <agruen@suse.de>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Posix capabilities
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From: Olaf Dietsche <olaf.dietsche#list.linux-kernel@t-online.de>
Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2002 17:36:40 +0200
In-Reply-To: <20021017121213.GA13573@think.thunk.org> ("Theodore Ts'o"'s
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"Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu> writes:
> On Thu, Oct 17, 2002 at 01:02:25PM +0200, Andreas Gruenbacher wrote:
>> With capabilities the kernel ensures that
>> applications cannot exceed their capabilities.

Which is a _big_ plus.

> as compared
> to having every single individual administrator have make this
> determination by his or herself.

I don't see this. It's a distribution issue. There will be
administrators, who want to do it on their own, but those will be a
minority.

> Each additional thing which the system administrator has to do, is an
> additional thing that he/she can *get* *wrong*.  System administators
> aren't stupid, just over-loaded, and often asked to administer
> something that's too complicated.

Once the distributions have taken care of this, there's nothing too
complicated left.

> Millions and millions of knobs and dials are not necessarily a good
> thing.  If there is basically only one correct answer for how the
> knobs can be set up, sure, you can have a complex database for
> applications to determine what sort of capability masks they should
> have, and you can run that database against your database every night
> (otherwise, you might miss someone quietly modifying one or two
> capability masks to leave him/herself a back door).  
>
> But why go through all that effort?

Because it's easier, than patching millions and millions of programs?

Regards, Olaf.
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