Looking for Unix user agent shell

[Bill Mayhew]

I agree.  I have not been very excited by anything that I have seen
so far for 386 Unix.  The AT&T FACE user agent is pretty obnoxious
compared to the 3B1's user agent.  FACE is more secure than the
3B1 user agent, but there still may be holes; I have not tested
FACE exhaustively yet.  It is ridiculously easy for common users to
obtain full root authorization with the 3B1 user agent.  In fact,
it is essentially impossible to prevent a person using the 3B1 ua
from obtaining root access.  On my 3B1 system, ua is exec'ed from a
start-up C program to prevent any operation of ua from a dial-in
line.

I was surprised at the slowness of FACE; it paints the screen
relatively slowly, even on my 33 MHz 386 system (512K VGA, 8 meg
RAM).  FACE, as delivered, is pretty bare bones stuff.  The user
menus are very basic.  There is no mail notification mechanism,
etc.  With some work, you could do a lot of stuff, but it would
definitely be a chore.

I really learned to appreciate my 3B1 system more once I got my 386
sytem.  There are quite a number of things on the 3B1 that are
missing from AT&T Sys V 3.2.1.  Most notable is the absence of even
nroff from 3.2.1; obviously a blantant move to force you to buy the
now unbundled DWB stuff.


== Bill ==
-- 
Bill Mayhew  Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine
Rootstown, OH  44272-9995  USA    phone: 216-325-2511
wtm at uhura.neoucom.edu   ....!uunet!aablue!neoucom!wtm
via internet: (140.220.001.001)