5 ms·

Just NFS, I assume. It doesn't take more.

by perbu 2y ago

tankenmate 2y ago
and NIS/NIS+ if using NFS. being DecStations though it might have been using the whole DCE/RPC ecosystem (which was later adopted by MS for MSRPC and hence NTLM and SMB/CIFS).
- lizknope 2y ago
  We had the whole DCE Project Athena setup at my school. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Athena https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Athena Everything was encrypted through Kerberos and AFS. We had a mix of workstations running DEC Ultrix, SunOS, Solaris, HP-UX, SGI IRIX, IBM AIX, and Linux. The computing center compiled every GNU utility and put those in the PATH first so the environment was basically the same and you rarely had to worry about what type of machine you were on. We could ask a student who worked in the computing center to compile some new X11 window manager and they would and install it for all the different architectures and using AFS @sys string it would transparently link to the specific binary for that platform so you didn't need to modify your PATH We had Zephyr instant messaging and the .anyone file where you could put all your friends in a file and see who was logged in. We would send Zephyr messages on some broadcast groups and see who wanted to meet up for lunch. I made friends with people I didn't even know before through that. This was all from 1993-97 and then I got a job and it was like the stone age with NFS / NIS groups and chmod permissions. We are now creating stuff like zephyr with Slack
guenthert 2y ago
Well any network filesystem really. AFS was popular at some larger sites.
- lizknope 2y ago
  My school used AFS. It was great being able to use ACLs to give a specific student and no one else access to a directory in my account. Then we could make groups of students for group projects. Then I got a job in 1997 and it was back to traditional Unix groups where you need root or NIS admin access to create and modify groups. It's 2024 and I work at a company with 8,000 people and it still takes a few days to get multiple Unix group access for everything on a new project.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
    I've thought about trying out AFS; there are apparently open source server and clients available, and it seems to have some different design choices to let it work nicely over WAN compared to NFS. Less clear that the FOSS versions do the user/permission management stuff (though maybe they do), but that wouldn't matter as much for personal use.
    - eichin 2y ago
      Debian has the packages and some decent README's for setting up a server. OpenAFS is a later version than the IBM AFS you might have seen in the 90s and it has all of the user-management and ACL-related features - which are quite useful for personal use (sharing files with specific friends, instead of the entire internet; insert-only directories are also useful for that kind of thing.) It's definitely not for most people - it's a lot of sysadmin work for a homelab (though it does get you volume-level replication and shuffling, but you don't really get much out of that unless you have at least two machines as servers.) You're also going to need a personal kerberos realm (which isn't much work, it's just One More Thing.)
  - _joel 2y ago
    Err, LDAP? SSSD etc :) or just beurocracy (I guess!)
    - lizknope 2y ago
      I'm not actually sure. We have a web page where we request group access and then I think it emails another project lead and they have to approve it but I don't know how it all works. Then we have another internal command that we run in every new shell where we include the groups we want access to. It runs and if we run the "groups" command before and after we see the new groups. But there is a limit to the number of groups so it is a pain if you need to access multiple projects at the same time because libraries and stuff are in different project areas.

Just NFS, I assume. It doesn't take more.

by perbu 2y ago

Just NFS, I assume. It doesn't take more.

and NIS/NIS+ if using NFS. being DecStations though it might have been using the whole DCE/RPC ecosystem (which was later adopted by MS for MSRPC and hence NTLM and SMB/CIFS).

lizknope 2y ago
We had the whole DCE Project Athena setup at my school. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Athena https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Athena Everything was encrypted through Kerberos and AFS. We had a mix of workstations running DEC Ultrix, SunOS, Solaris, HP-UX, SGI IRIX, IBM AIX, and Linux. The computing center compiled every GNU utility and put those in the PATH first so the environment was basically the same and you rarely had to worry about what type of machine you were on. We could ask a student who worked in the computing center to compile some new X11 window manager and they would and install it for all the different architectures and using AFS @sys string it would transparently link to the specific binary for that platform so you didn't need to modify your PATH We had Zephyr instant messaging and the .anyone file where you could put all your friends in a file and see who was logged in. We would send Zephyr messages on some broadcast groups and see who wanted to meet up for lunch. I made friends with people I didn't even know before through that. This was all from 1993-97 and then I got a job and it was like the stone age with NFS / NIS groups and chmod permissions. We are now creating stuff like zephyr with Slack

guenthert 2y ago

Well any network filesystem really. AFS was popular at some larger sites.

lizknope 2y ago
My school used AFS. It was great being able to use ACLs to give a specific student and no one else access to a directory in my account. Then we could make groups of students for group projects. Then I got a job in 1997 and it was back to traditional Unix groups where you need root or NIS admin access to create and modify groups. It's 2024 and I work at a company with 8,000 people and it still takes a few days to get multiple Unix group access for everything on a new project.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  I've thought about trying out AFS; there are apparently open source server and clients available, and it seems to have some different design choices to let it work nicely over WAN compared to NFS. Less clear that the FOSS versions do the user/permission management stuff (though maybe they do), but that wouldn't matter as much for personal use.
  - eichin 2y ago
    Debian has the packages and some decent README's for setting up a server. OpenAFS is a later version than the IBM AFS you might have seen in the 90s and it has all of the user-management and ACL-related features - which are quite useful for personal use (sharing files with specific friends, instead of the entire internet; insert-only directories are also useful for that kind of thing.) It's definitely not for most people - it's a lot of sysadmin work for a homelab (though it does get you volume-level replication and shuffling, but you don't really get much out of that unless you have at least two machines as servers.) You're also going to need a personal kerberos realm (which isn't much work, it's just One More Thing.)
- _joel 2y ago
  Err, LDAP? SSSD etc :) or just beurocracy (I guess!)
  - lizknope 2y ago
    I'm not actually sure. We have a web page where we request group access and then I think it emails another project lead and they have to approve it but I don't know how it all works. Then we have another internal command that we run in every new shell where we include the groups we want access to. It runs and if we run the "groups" command before and after we see the new groups. But there is a limit to the number of groups so it is a pain if you need to access multiple projects at the same time because libraries and stuff are in different project areas.