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Grex > Coop11 > #7: Grex vs. Malthus, round Sixty-Five Thousand, Five Hundred and Thirty-Six |  |
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| Author |
Message |
| 11 new of 74 responses total. |
scott
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response 64 of 74:
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Aug 27 18:28 UTC 1999 |
PicoSpan/Backtalk does not use UID. Login IDs, however...
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pfv
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response 65 of 74:
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Aug 27 18:53 UTC 1999 |
Oy, geezus.. It never occured to me.. This is Not A Good Thing
(tm), yet.. I don't seehow the hell you can solve it short of
paying attention to uid, name and some sorta' flag indicating
a reaped & reallocated uid/name.
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don
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response 66 of 74:
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Aug 28 00:05 UTC 1999 |
Okay, Joe, I get what you're saying. The thing is that usually files
related to the former person gets deleted when they're reaped or otherwize
delete their account. You *may* be right about uids being used for picospan
ownership, but you'l notice that uids are recycled every year or so, and
nothing's gonna happen if a ridiculously old message gets scribbled.
Besides, I'm not *advocating* recycling (although we would be in pretty deep
shit if we didn't recycle and haven't upgraded our 16-bit os), I'm simply
saying that it's already a policy *in place*, so we don't ever have to worry
about the uid counter reaching 65k, we only have to worry about 65k users.
The whole purpose of my first response was to say that a) STeve was wrong
about impending doom, ergo b) We have a hell of a long time to fix this, so
all of the original (read, ridiculously old messages that might as well get
scribbled) arguments against trying to upgrade are now null and void, and we
have to wonder if this 65k problem will ever actually be a problem (it's gonna
be kinda hard for 65k people to want to be on grex when only 85 can be on at
the same time); right before the long-term plan item went dormant again, I
had raised this issue as one of the things we would need to do once we started
upgrading. Then again, we'll probably have to upgrade to a new OS anyway for
multiple reasons, and we can be pretty sure that it'll be 32-bit, which means
we can have 4,294,967,296 users. That is enough for every man, woman, and
child who will be in a position to have access to a computer for at least
a decade.
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jerome
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response 67 of 74:
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Aug 28 02:56 UTC 1999 |
I'd have to argure that there is in fact a problem when the uid counter
reaches 65k -- when that happens the gid counter is incremented, and a
new name must be created for this new group. The problem is there are
just so many, many, interesting names to choose from... :-)
Fortunately there's an item in this cf that takes care of that.
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janc
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response 68 of 74:
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Aug 28 19:11 UTC 1999 |
Um, Picospan uses both uid and login name. If someone gets reaped, and
you wait about a year until that uid is about to be assigned again, then
you could create a new account using the same login name and getting the
same uid number. Then you could go and censor that user's postings (now
about a year old). Copies would all be put in the censored log, so it
could be fixed if anyone noticed that someone else was censoring these
year-old posts. Basically, I don't think this is a big enough problem
to worry about.
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davel
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response 69 of 74:
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Aug 29 01:11 UTC 1999 |
To do that someone would have to watch UIDs being assigned, run newuser at
just the right time, & not collide with anyone else running newuser at the
same time. It's not impossible, but I'm with Jan. We have *real* problems
to worry about.
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don
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response 70 of 74:
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Aug 29 22:57 UTC 1999 |
My point exactly.
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lilmo
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response 71 of 74:
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Sep 11 00:25 UTC 1999 |
So, is letting the uid counter reach 65k a problem, or not? I'm not clear.
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janc
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response 72 of 74:
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Sep 11 04:27 UTC 1999 |
No problem. Only problem is if we let the number of accounts that exist
at any one time exceed 65k. This isn't going to happy any time soon.
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lilmo
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response 73 of 74:
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Sep 13 21:23 UTC 1999 |
OK, thanks.
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davel
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response 74 of 74:
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Sep 16 10:55 UTC 1999 |
Actually, the problem is deciding what group to use for the new accounts.
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