Re: multimple domain authentication

[email protected] Wed, 1 Sep 2004 15:32:06 -0700
Newsgroups gmane.os.plan9.nine-grid
Message-ID <[email protected]>
If one permits access by grid users to the local file servers, there's
still a mismatch between the notion of user as defined by /adm/users
and general access being granted by suitable authentication.  The file
servers need some way to sort out access rights.

Without going the full Globus route, one could define one user in
/adm/users per class of grid user, thus some user like `anygrid' might
be granted (via normal permissions) ordinary `other' access and belong
to no other groups.  `anylanl' might belong to a group with write
access to some files.  So part of authentication would be mapping
incoming users to file server users and thus access rights.

Or maybe the file servers could treat user@authdom specially and
authenticate such users via the appropriate auth server upon attach.
Ken's fs at least is likely to run out of unique integer uids (which
it does use internally, and stores in [signed] shorts currently) after
a while; how do you know when a grid user is gone forever?  I'm not
sure if fossil user names eventually resolve to an integer or not.