[tahoe-dev] User management

[zooko]

Francesco:

There's nothing stupid about you and your friends wanting the share  
the ability to start and stop a tahoe node.  That kind of thing is  
what the unix group permissions scheme was designed for.  But for  
many users of unix systems nowadays, the unix group permissions are  
not as convenient as instead creating a new account and giving each  
participant the password to that new account.  However, you can't do  
that as easily, and there's nothing inherently wrong with wanting to  
do it using unix group permissions.

However, since we typically use the other pattern (creating a  
separate account and giving its password to everyone who should be  
able to start and stop the tahoe node), then tahoe isn't fully  
compatible with it.  We already discussed the issue with "chmod  
0600", and also Brian's message made me aware that when you execute  
"tahoe" to stop a currently running node, it probably won't be able  
to stop it unless your account was the one that was used to start  
it.  (Since the operating system doesn't let you kill processes that  
are running under someone else's unix account.)

Regards,

Zooko