Re: what's next for the linux kernel?

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl@lkcl.net>]

On Wed, Oct 05, 2005 at 11:30:06AM -0400, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 05, 2005 at 04:24:47PM +0100, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
> >   ahh, *sigh*, i remember the days.
> > 
> >   in 1989 i looked in /tmp on our sunos 4.1.3 server at
> >   imperial, which was running a bit slow, went "eek, that's
> >   a lot of files in /tmp" and did am rm -fr /tmp.
> 
> Why would /tmp allow you to delete files there you didn't own unless you
> were root?  

 i have no idea.  as a user, i just did rm -fr /tmp/* (sorry - not
 rm -fr /tmp) and it worked.

 as a user.

 not root.

> >   a few minutes later the sysadmins quite literally stormed in.
> 
> And promptly removed root access from the person that wasn't qualified
> to have it in the first place? :)
 
 they weren't dumb enough to give it to me.

> >   apparently the printer queue temp files were stored in /tmp and 100
> >   third year students were all trying to print out their course-work,
> >   last minute.
> > 
> And why would the printer queue use /tmp in the first place?
 
 ahh, that would answer the implicit question as to why they
 jumped up and down at me rather than frog-marched me off campus.

> >   oops.
> > 
> >   yes, imperial college third year theory of computing students of
> >   1987-1990, it was me.
> 
> Did they ever let you have root again?

 i was a student there.  they didn't let _anyone_ like me have root.
 
 someone got into trouble for even demonstrating a security
 vulnerability.

 l.