langz@asylum.SF.CA.US (Lang Zerner) (06/08/89)
A lot of the difficulties stemming from the PC-ish design philosophy behind the NeXT system could be made less severe if the network services designed at MIT's Project Athena (or similar functionality) were supported. Athena assumes public workstations on the network, and creates a secure network with one or more physically secure network servers. The primary services are Hesiod (a name service used, for example, to translate a username into an /etc/passwd entry, no matter where on the net the user logs in); Kerberos, an authentication server; and Zephyr, a message transport service. There may be some others. Athena has been running a heterogenous network of mainly publicly accessible workstations. Users can log in as root on the local workstation, reboot, whatever, and the network remains clean and secure. I was at Athena as a trainer and technical writer, so I don't know the technical feasibility of implementing these services on the NeXT, but I would be interested to know if anyone is working on it. -- Be seeing you... --Lang Zerner ARPA:langz@athena.mit.edu MX:langz@asylum.sf.ca.us UUCP:bionet!asylum!langz "...and every morning we had to go and LICK the road clean with our TONGUES!"