[RFD]: Egor's proposal for a Cygwin server process

[Corinna Vinschen]

Hi,

I would like to revive the discussion about a sort of server process
providing critical services to Cygwin processes.

The reason is that I found another good example how such a server
could be used: s-uid and s-gid applications and files.

Now that I know how to switch user context and while trying to
port Paul Vixie's cron/crontab to Cygwin I found that it's
annoying not to have that feature of other operating systems
(no names!). To set s-uid/s-gid bits in the NTFS filesystem
is trivial (ntsec ON!) but a non-privileged user can't start
a privileged process as with the s bits.

Only a server process running under LocalSystem account (or
another account with appropriate privileges) could serve
non-privileged user processes with that feature.

So, as far as I can see, we have already three reasons to
invent that server process:

- Secure handles
- IPC
- s-uid, s-gid facility

I think we will find more later on.

So, how is the current "mood" related to such a server process
and how keen are people to work on that?

Has somebody a suggestion how to interact with that server process?
Sockets? Named pipes? Smoke signals?

Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Developer                                mailto:cygwin@cygwin.com
Red Hat, Inc.