Beware of excessive assumptions in programs. Remember that Ariane 501 rocket exploded because programmers assumed some circumstances without first verifying that they are true...
The new msec package fiddles quite a lot about file permissions, and assumes "for certain" things that are common but not guaranteed. For example: *it assumes that every entry in /home is always the homedir of a user. While this is true in a vanilla lonely Mandrake system freshly installed from scratch, it is wrong in many places. When the station is a node in a cluster of machines sharing users, userdirs are often mounted from other places, like: /home/teamname/username. *also, msec fiddles with kdm display of users icons. kfm offers at least: "none", "selected", or "all". msec forces it to "all" or "none". In our case, each station is in a team, display about 10 users, not the 100+ users of the whole lab! Networked pools of machine are the traditional setup for Unix systems. Please be careful, while trying to extend Linux on the home market, not to lose the original niche. ... and it looks like msec comes quite often back to force changes against the system administrator will. This has the potential of getting many systems administrators upset. *** Solution (well, idea at least) There could be some interface à la kudzu that spots each change: "msec has noticed that the permission of /home/team/ was changed from 711/drwx--x--x to 755/drwxr-xr-x. What should msec do ? * change it back to 711/drwx--x--x * let 755/drwx--x--x be the new normal value to enforce * from now on, don't check /home/team/ permissions again Remember this situation and do not ask again [y/N]: _" My two euro-cents for today. -- Stéphane Gourichon - Labo. d'Informatique de Paris 6 - AnimatLab http://animatlab.lip6.fr - philo du dimanche http://amphi-gouri.org/ "Bonjour, je ne suis qu'une phrase entre guillemets dans une signature, mais si vous me recopiez dans votre signature automatique d'e-mail, alors je pourrai continuer à me reproduire comme un virus. Merci !"
