chown (was: at files and permissions)

[Peter da Silva]

In article <34422 at bu-cs.BU.EDU>, bzs at bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) writes:
> Don't tell me, you start moving some of their stuff off to tape. Oh
> what fun, let's have about two dozen people to run this system just to
> handle [ a bunch of stuff that can be handled quite well by 20 lines of
	   shell scripts ]

[ comments to the effect that saving hoggy users stuff off to tape isn't
  workable -- politics, etc... ]

Have a look at mainframes, where you generally have lots of disk farms.
They have automatic mechanisms to roll stuff off to tape, and bring it back.
If it's handled automatically (i.e., they can't dump on a tech aide for
following orders), then politics isn't any more a problem than with quotas.

This works a *lot* better.

> Obviously little systems don't need quotas very badly (tho, hey, they
> solve both problems you describe with one model, why introduce two
> systems where one will do?)

And big systems need better mechanisms than quotas.
-- 
Peter da Silva, Xenix Support, Ferranti International Controls Corporation.
Business: peter at ficc.uu.net, +1 713 274 5180. | "try out a seldom-used feature
Personal: peter at sugar.hackercorp.com.   `-_-' |  of C -- the ``comment''."
Quote: Have you hugged your wolf today?  'U`  |   -- David Gelhar.