File daemons (was: How do I detect who and when A file gets accessed ?)

[Steve Hayman]

In article <11154 at smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn at brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn) writes:
>>John Sellens suggests writing a program to manage groups, creating
>> new ones as needed, so that people can create their own groups.
>
>This doesn't work, because the group-ID space isn't big enough for
>every combination of access rights to have its own group (unless,
>that is, your site has only a handful of users).


I don't think John meant that you'd have to have a group for every
possible combination of users.  A "group daemon" could hand out new
group ID's as needed, recycle the old unused ones, and so on.  Of
course it would break down if people wanted to create a billion
different groups, but in normal usage, I imagine most users would only
need to create a few specialized groups.

I might want to create one for me and you and John if we three were
working on some project, but I wouldn't want or need to create
groups containing me and all the other possible users.  It'd be
handy to have a group daemon so that I wouldn't have to bug
the sysadmin every time I needed a special group.

Steve Hayman

-- 
Steve Hayman    Workstation Manager    Computer Science Department   Indiana U.
sahayman at iuvax.cs.indiana.edu                                    (812) 855-6984