Brain Dump #1

[Vance Shipley]

On Thu, Feb 06, 2003 at 05:45:16PM +0100, Vlad Dumitrescu (EAW) wrote:
}  
}  What if someone evil outside this list finds out about this, downloads Erlang, enters the system and begins to "have fun" by running os:cmd("rm -rf *")? ;-)

In what I had in mind the cookie would only be shared within the cabal.  It
isn't too hard to install things in such a way that a malicious user couldn't
do too much damage without a lot of effort.  You create an embedded system
first of all running with the privileges of the ordinary user 'otpuser'.  Give
it a restricted shell and set the permissions of things such that he can't
muck with the filesystem much.  I'm not much of a system administrator but
I would think that a reasonable template for an installation for this use 
could be come up with fairly easily.

The idea would be to give access to a real distributed system, with a medium
number of nodes, for development purposes.  Much like Sourceforge's "compile
farm".

	-Vance