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<p>Oh, it's something beyond annoying, but it's not the accounting
system confounding you; that can be completely disabled (I have it
off on my systems). The policy is actually built into the Tops-20
file system itself.</p>
<p>Directories under Tops-20 are vastly different--both in concept
and implementation--from anything else that I've seen (and I did a
lot of research into file system design at one particular job).
Directory creation is cumbersome, typically requiring expert level
intervention or significant programming. However, it's whaay
better than what Tops-10 had at the time (nothing), ITS (don't
ask), WAITS (nothing) or MVS (partitioned data sets, a true hack).</p>
<p>Create a directory under Unix? <tt>mkdir</tt>. Easyn peasy.
Windows? <tt>md, </tt>unless you are running quotas. Also no
heavy lift.<br>
</p>
<p>Tops-20 got more and more complex. In addition to having to take
quota away from the superior and hand it over to the
sub-directory, unless you are running PANDA modifications, you
have to create an access group and allocate it or the poor user
can't see his own sub-directory. Group management can be
confusing if you are running super-domestic structures and
downright tedious for regular structures, otherwise. There was
more; Yeesh... Instead of trying to check for every possible
problem beforehand, it was sometimes easier to catch errors from
the <tt>CRDIR%</tt>, go recursive and modify the superior (and on
up).<br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">You can defeat some of this. Setting <tt>CD%NSQ</tt>
will cause <tt>CRDIR%</tt> to no update the the superior, but you
need rights to do it. I always thought that there was a better
way to do this, perhaps with an <tt>IPCF%</tt> based
client/server application, coupled with some changes to the access
control job.</div>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix"><br>
</div>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Why all this hair? Directories were
considered precious resources. Why would that be? Consider what
happens when you try to fit (or cram) a user population of over
25,000 students onto the triple 180 MB disk structures of the time
(the maximum you could do in 1980's). You get measly user
permanent quotas of 100 pages (250KB), working of 1,000. Not
much.</div>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix"><br>
</div>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">It's a vastly different world now. So
Tops-20 needs a <tt>mkdir</tt>, but that would need to talk to a
privileged backend with policy and directory creation smarts. I
think that would be pretty friendly; definitely easier than trying
to suss out <tt>BUILD</tt> or <tt>^ECREATE</tt>.<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:40077831-865d-bc92-5dd8-e89e4f986f47@softjar.se">
<hr width="100%" size="2">On 7/4/2019 2:48 PM, Johnny Billquist
wrote:<br>
<br>
The one annoying detail of the account system in TOPS-20 is that
user disk quotas are on a per directory basis. So you have to
manually move your disk quota around for your subdirectories.
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">
<hr width="100%" size="2">On 2019-07-04 04:01, Thomas DeBellis
wrote:
<br>
<br>
Tops-20 is vastly different from Unix (and I believe also VMS)
as to how it manages user ids and accounts. Parts of the
authentication paradigm are very tightly woven into the the file
system. Briefly,
<br>
<ul>
<li>A user id is a login-able directory (I.E., one that
doesn't have apassword and is not set FILES-ONLY). In
addition to basic OS restrictions which prevent you from
viewing file system meta-data unless you have appropriate
authorization, an access control job (ACJ) is layered on top
of this which can even restrict privileged users.
</li>
<li>Accounts are either validated out of a binary accounting
file in monitor space (which is compiled from ASCII source)
or via the ACJ. Accounts can have multiple users or
systems processes (such as spoolers) creating billing
records. Users can switch between accounts on a per-job,
per-fork and intra-program basis (a program can decide to
bill certain portions of its activity to different
accounts).
</li>
<li>The obvious benefit is that there is no password file to
attack or steal and you can't even tell that there is an
accounting file; probing passwords is monitored and a
certain amount of intervention is done. It is /extremely/
fast. No /etc/passwd to grovel.
</li>
</ul>
However, a deleterious side-effect is that once an id is
created, it can be used for _anything_, including online
interactive login.
<br>
<br>
On a PANDA monitor, is possible to specify a user id as
FTP-ONLY, but neither the supplied 5 series ACJ nor the EXEC do
anything with it. Historically, the Tops-20 FTP server
implemented ANONYMOUS usage by parsing for the login user atom
ANONYMOUS and then swallowing anything for the password (what
was typically supplied was an email addresses). This was then
hardwired into a local id.
<br>
<br>
Artifacts of this still exist in certain browers. Guess who
supplies IEUSER@ as the email address password for ANONYOUS
usage?
<br>
<br>
I recall that this is the approach that we had to use with
Tops-20 FAL. The Extended Mode FTP server that I wrote is
configurable via a file to specify the underlying id and
password. More productization would probably including having
the ACJ enforce FTP-ONLY on LOGIN% or CRJOB% and having the EXEC
parse for and display FTP-ONLY. Probably about two weeks' part
time work as I recall. Might have to consider Batch policy.
<br>
<br>
One approach here could be to lift the ANONYMOUS code out of
EFTPSR and drop it into FAL and then do the changes to the ACJ
and EXEC. I'm just surprised none of the HECnet Tops-10 or
Tops-20 nerds have done it (there is some commonality in some of
the sources).
<br>
<br>
Since Tops-20 has a BLISS compiler which implements BLISS COMMON
(my first training at DEC as an employee was to write code that
would cross compile under VMS, RSX, Tops-10 and Tops-20). I
think it might be useful to review some of the VMS DECnet
source, if any of that is available. It might be possible to
lift some functionality, which could be fun.
<br>
<br>
Does the VMS hobbiest license get you source code?
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">
<hr width="100%" size="2">On 7/3/2019 7:21 PM, Johnny
Billquist wrote:
<br>
<br>
VMS, as someone else mentioned, have a default account for
FAL.
<br>
<br>
RSX does not have that. However, you can use proxy access in
RSX to achieve something similar. Enable incoming and
outgoing proxy, and define a default account that incoming
requests should be using that way.
<br>
<br>
If TOPS-20 can do this I don't know. But it's a suggestion
for something else/more to check.
<br>
<br>
Johnny
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">
<hr width="100%" size="2">On 2019-07-03 14:15, Thomas
DeBellis wrote:
<br>
<br>
I have some software that I'd like to post, but don't recall
how to configure FAL to allow for an anonymous connection;
to download from a restricted directory.
<br>
<br>
I know how to do it for the FTP server (seeing as I wrote
it), but ... different code base.
<br>
<br>
I can only vaguely remember what we did for CCnet at
Columbia University in the 1980's, but I think it was kind
of a hack.<br>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
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