scenario: no registry access, C:\ locked out

[Chris Faylor]

On Tue, Jun 20, 2000 at 09:01:41PM -0400, Andrew Patrzalek wrote:
>System administrators are allowed to access the registry to change it, a
>non-privileged user is not.  For instance, work stations on many networks
>are locked out, for various reasons, preventing a non-privileged user from
>running regedit to alter the registry. However, another partition, say d:\,
>is allowed for use by this user for programs which don't require the
>registry for running. This is where cygwin can really shine, 32-bit
>executables, no registry needed. Programs can be compiled, tested and
>demonstrated without violating network restrictions and commitments.

Are you saying that there is a scenario where someone implements registry
security by locking out regedit but any other program (i.e., cygwin) is
able to write to the registry?  That doesn't sound like a very secure
system.

If, on the other hand, the registry is completely locked from being
written then I don't understand how cygwin comes into play. I don't
know what a partition has to to with the registry either.  Are you
saying that the disk holding the Windows directory is write-locked?

Can you give a specific example of something you'd like to see changed
in Cygwin?  Are you saying that it should not read the mount table
from the registry?  Or, that the user should not be able to write to the
mount table?  Those are the only two instances that I can think of where
cygwin normally accesses the registry.  There are a couple of other minor
cases but they are not common.

cgf