-headless and blocking users from modifying things

Tim Rowledge tim at sumeru.stanford.edu
Mon Aug 26 17:16:42 UTC 2002


Marcel Weiher <marcel at metaobject.com> is claimed by the authorities to have written:

> 
> On Friday, August 2, 2002, at 04:33  Uhr, Rob Whitfield wrote:
> 
> > I have a server app that I run with the -headless command line option. 
> > The problem is that on NT (at least) this results in teh squeak icon 
> > being placed in the system tray.  If the user clicks the icon in the 
> > system tray then squak expands, exposing the user to the whole squeak 
> > UI.  Is there a way to lock users out from doing ANYTHING in the 
> > squeak UI?  Password protection perhaps?
> >
> > If there is nothing straightforward that can be done I may need to 
> > build headless VMs for my various platforms (NT, Mac OSX, Mac OS9).
> 
> CocoaSqueak can be built without the UI classes, resulting in a pure 
> terminal-based app.
Shouldn't be needed. The vm should only include the stuff needed to
start up and handle the object memory and interpretation/compilation.
Everything else ought to be in plugins - indeed one can make good
arguments for the object memory and execution machinery to be plugins
much as Phiho has worked on. The image should control whether any file,
security, display, sound, coffee making or whatever plugins are loaded.
'-headless' shouldn't be a switch on the vm, it should be an arg that
the image can look at and decide what to do.

Whenver possible policy should be in the image and only supporting
mechanism in the vm.

tim
-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Machine-independent:  Does not run on any existing machine.




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