On Tuesday, January 14, 2014 2:00 AM [GMT+1=CET], John Cowan wrote:
SZIGETI Szabolcs scripsit:
Well, with the same reasoning, we don't need
passwords or protection
bits on files, since I can always take a piece of steel pipe and
beat the owner, until he gives out the data, so why bother?
More like beating my argument with a pipe than the owner.
Blocking chown for general users is one level of
several controls.
Its specific purpose was to make per-user quotas practical, but since
per-user quotas are as dead as the dodo, it no longer serves any known
purpose.
I don't think quotas are dead. It seems nowadays the "preferred" storage
backend for email on Unix/Linux mail servers is Maildir, and Maildir uses
the
filesystem as its own backend, together with the filesystem's quota facility
to give or take storage space to/from mailboxes -- yes, provided the users
are real system users and not "virtual users", but still.
What is "dead as the dodo" is multi-user shell access. But that does not
mean
multi-user shell access should be removed from modern systems, no matter how
dead it may be.
-Pepe.