wtm@uhura.neoucom.EDU (Bill Mayhew) (07/10/90)
I agree. I have not been very excited by anything that I have seen so far for 386 Unix. The AT&T FACE user agent is pretty obnoxious compared to the 3B1's user agent. FACE is more secure than the 3B1 user agent, but there still may be holes; I have not tested FACE exhaustively yet. It is ridiculously easy for common users to obtain full root authorization with the 3B1 user agent. In fact, it is essentially impossible to prevent a person using the 3B1 ua from obtaining root access. On my 3B1 system, ua is exec'ed from a start-up C program to prevent any operation of ua from a dial-in line. I was surprised at the slowness of FACE; it paints the screen relatively slowly, even on my 33 MHz 386 system (512K VGA, 8 meg RAM). FACE, as delivered, is pretty bare bones stuff. The user menus are very basic. There is no mail notification mechanism, etc. With some work, you could do a lot of stuff, but it would definitely be a chore. I really learned to appreciate my 3B1 system more once I got my 386 sytem. There are quite a number of things on the 3B1 that are missing from AT&T Sys V 3.2.1. Most notable is the absence of even nroff from 3.2.1; obviously a blantant move to force you to buy the now unbundled DWB stuff. == Bill == -- Bill Mayhew Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine Rootstown, OH 44272-9995 USA phone: 216-325-2511 wtm@uhura.neoucom.edu ....!uunet!aablue!neoucom!wtm via internet: (140.220.001.001)