Mail Archives: opendos/1997/05/08/16:15:33
On Wed, 7 May 1997, Jason M. Daniels wrote:
> which is not true piping. 'All the other major OSes'? Besides Microsoft's
> OSes, what other OSes are there that aren't Unix or Unix variants and
> aren't GUIs (which would be hard to impliment piping under, considering).
Agree DOS and Win95 don't do real piping. I think OS/2 does, and maybe
WinNT in console mode... Probably others, but not that I can think of...
> >> Now, with Linux, the OS which gives us a choice.
> >
> >What choice? The choice between Dos/Windoze and Yet Another Unix
> >Clone? Wow! What a choice!
>
> Exactly. Before, there was no choice at all. You had to run some form of
> DOS. There was simply no other OS for personal computers. (Except MacOS,
> of course, if you want to even consider Macs to be computers... :)
And its a choice within the operating system itself! You have have about a
dozen or two windows manager for X that'll give you the look you want (be
that NeXTStep-like, MacOS-like or even Win95-like!), and most of them will
let you warp them out of their bounds!
> I have used Windows 95. Quite extensively during some of my jobs. And I
> can most definetly agree with the writer above when he says that
> Microsoft is not the answer.
I currently manage 2 networks, one of them connected to the Internet, that
are composed of Win95 machines and a WinNT Server 4.0 as the server. It
has to have great security (or at least some stability) to the
workstations, since they are high school-level computer labs, with
students trying all the time to do things they shouldn't do (like run
Netscape while in an English course, or change the background).
Ok, so I run fascist network policies using Policy Editor. There's a
checkbox that says that you have to be authenticated on the NT domain to
open a session. All right, I check this. It works correctly when the
network is ok, but when the network is down (which happen often due to the
already-present hardware being dead cheap using 10Base-2 (no, I'm NOT
responsible for this!)), it tries to authenticate and when it finally
times out, it simply shows you the Windows login and you can enter using
whatever username you fancy! If you use Administrator, you'll also get the
Admin policies. If there's a password on the machine itself for Admin, you
can enter using whatever username you think is fun and delete the password
file and then enter as Admin.
Microsoft's Tech Support answer for that was: "Sorry, that's probably a
bug, I don't know. We cannot help you with this.". Great. So I can have
any kid come and deltree the whole thing down. Or install Doom. Whatever.
I worked around it with major batch files hacking, bringing major
inconveniences to the users for the price of secure stations and even at
that, it's like a shotgunned swiss cheese.
Also, one of the things I had on my Novell networks was a "drop your
homework" directory, where you have a directory where the users can only
copy a file there, no deletions or readings. All the students use a single
login name "student" (for management reasons, it has to stay that way). I
used the NTFS permission system to make the directory "W" (with a choice
out of "RWXD" (read, write, execute, delete)). So you can write, and not
read, execute or *delete* a file. Guess what I could do anyway? Could
delete or read the files. Didn't try execute. I simply couldn't achieve my
goal, and I think this "drop your homework" directory concept isn't that
weird, isn't it? If someone can help me with this, please do.
Pierre Phaneuf
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