From: Matt McLeod Date: 00:56 on 27 Jan 2004 Subject: Tru64 "enhanced" security I am not at all sure what we gain by using this FPOS, but someone at some point decided that we must use it (presumably because the name implies some benefit to system security) so now we're stuck with it. It's particularly awful in that it gives no useful debugging information when it is unhappy, even when using the "-v" switch to the various related commands -- which is *supposed* to provide additional information, but doesn't. In theory, if one needs to rebuild the databases (e.g., if one of the provided tools hoses them) you can run "convuser -a" to recreate them. However, more often than not you will get really useful error messages like: PUTPRPWNAM: root: Function not implemented or: PUTPRPWNAM: root: File exists which, as you will notice, do not say *which* function is not implemented. Nor which file exists. The latter is particularly hateful as it pops up even when no possibly related file does exist -- if it did, you wouldn't be trying to rebuild the damned database. As a final bonus, there seems to be bugger-all by way of useful documentation. Sure, prpasswd(4) looks like it might be helpful until you really need it, but then it's pretty much useless. Grr. Matt
From: Matt McLeod Date: 15:48 on 16 Jan 2004 Subject: OS X and network filesystems This has been getting on my nerves for a while now. So. We have an SMB network browser built in to the automounter. Great. Nice enough idea. But it doesn't work reliably. Sometimes machines will show up in /Network, sometimes they won't, and sometimes they'll show up but the automounter won't mount any of the shares even when it knows the password and could quite easily do so. And when that happens, you have to mount them manually, in which case they appear as /Volumes/share rather than /Network/host/share. Which is a real PITA if you're trying to script anything. It's bloody irritating, and in four major revisions of the OS they *still* haven't managed to get this right. Matt
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