WAITS: Jobs, users and security

In the previous post we talked about PPNs like [1,REG]; here REG is the ID that identifies which user you are.

To create a new user ID, simply choose a 3 letter ID and log in as that. This must be on a device internal to SAIL, ie the console or display terminal, not via the external communication lines that are modelled by a telnet connection on simh.

Here I choose REL as an ID and log on. It asks me if I am sure, as this is a new ID, and if I type Y I am logged in and can run programs or create files.

.l 1,rel
JOB 1    Stanford 6.17/K 08-16-74
Are you sure? y
Friday  26-JUL-74       0945
.

If I log out with an empty directory, it will be removed.

.k
Your empty file directory has been deleted.

But it is recreated the next time I log in.

If you had logged in as 1, FOO, you would get this message when you logged out:

You are not an authorized user. Your files have been deleted.

This turns out to be a simple check in the LOGOUT routine - if your user ID is one of FOO, BAR, BAZ, ABC, 100 it will say you are unauthorised, probably because these are common IDs used for testing.

You will note that no password was asked for at any stage. You can set a password by replacing the . with a % at the login stage, eg L 1%REL. You get the option to only ask for a password if you are logging in remotely so you don't need to supply it when logging in via the console or display terminals.

The password is set at the PPN level on the user file directory entry, so you could have a different password for say 1,REL and 2,REL. According to the UUO (system calls) manual it is stored in plain text, case insensitive with a maximum length of 6 characters.

Files and directories have a 3 octal digit protection code.

The default protection is 000, so anyone can do anything.

To set protection on files, you need to use COPY with the /PROTECTION flag to create a new file with the desired level, eg

.copy /protection=006 foo2 ← foo1

would create FOO2 from FOO1 but set protection so guest users can't access it at all.

Directory protections can only be set by logging in with the % delimiter

WAITS is quite similar to TOPS-10 here so reading the Jobs on TOPS-10 post will give more details. But in brief:

When you log in to WAITS, it gives you a job number which lasts throughout your session. Some simple commands (like DAYTIME) you type are built into the monitor. Others need to be loaded into memory from core files, which have the extension .DMP on WAITS.

If you have a core file FOO.DMP in your directory you can invoke it with RUN FOO. Common programs are stored in the SYS: area, which is equivalent to [1,2], and programs here can be run using R. RUN can also take a file name and directory, so R LISP is the same as RUN LISP.DMP[1,2].

Some common programs, like COPY, are recognised by the monitor but behind the scenes it will invoke RUN on the right core file.

You can create another job by logging in a second terminal. But you can also DETACH from a job, which will suspend it and log you out, and then log in elsewhere and resume execution using ATTACH. Jobs can also run in the background if they do not need interact with the user's console.

All that is pretty much the same as TOPS-10. WAITS adds some more conveniences. FORK works like DETACH, but rather than logging you out will create a new job as your current ID. KILL can be used to kill a job owned by you.

WAITS replaces TOPS-10's SYSTAT with WHO, along with the "who line" we saw earlier on interactive terminals.

TOPS-10 had a fairly sophisticated batch processing system, where jobs could be submitted from the terminal or via cards, and queues of jobs could be maintained and run in the background.

WAITS chose instead for a simple facility to run from the terminal, similar to a shell script file on a modern system. The concept is you create a file with a set of commands or data to input to those commands. The end of each line must be denoted by a ↔ rather then Return. There are a number of other metacharacters to allow you to enter the special keys on the Stanford keyboard, eg ≠ will emit an Altmode key

You run the file with DO and it basically pastes data it into your keyboard buffer as if you'd typed it directly, expanding any metachracters.

There is provision for variables via the question mark and a single letter, eg ?A. The first time this is seen it will prompt for input and store that in variable A; from then on using ?A will expand it to the value you entered.

There is no looping or branching available, however.

As an example, if you have the file foo.do:

hello↔dir [?D,DOC]↔

and type DO FOO.DO it will run the hello command, prompt you for a value for D then do a directory listing of that area under DOC.

See the Monitor Command Manual for more details on these topics.

I welcome any questions or comments, and also especially any corrections if I have got something wrong. Please email me at rupert@timereshared.com and I will add it here and update the main text.