clyde@Utexas-11@sri-unix (10/26/82)
From: Clyde W Hoover <clyde@Utexas-11> Date: 23 Oct 1982 at 2042-CDT We here at Utexas are working on a UNIX User Data Base system that contains all the sort of things you suggest. I designed the system along lines such as you mentioned. We will be keeping all accounting information in the data base, program privilegdes (in particular ARPANET access), and all sorts of other goodies. In addition, there is a 'whois' user information block that users can set (real name, phone #, colleagues, etc - like the 20 finger/whowill be data base). This data is publicly readable while the system data will not be. We will be generating /etc/passwd from this data base, and I plan to do some really sick things to the encrypted passwords in /etc/passwd (since we won't be using them for anything real) to lead totally astray any brute-forcers. The access and modification libary routines are completed and I am now working on the first version of the data base manager. I hope to have something that can be looked at by other folks sometime towards the end of November, by Usenix next Jan. for sure (maybe not a distribution, but we'll see). I plan for the data base to affect the operation of the system in many essential ways. Most importantly, we will have total administrative control over user capabilites (disk quotas, whether they can send or recieve mail, even if they can change their password). There are a lot more possibilities that I have only begun to think about, and won't know the feasability of until we actually start using it. -------