[linux] Hiding arguments from ps

[Travis Saling]

With the exception that my users (faculty) pick the password, this is
pretty much exactly how I set it up. The announcement goes out
automatically to the address(es) indicated by the user. A copy also
goes to the sender, since (when I've set this up manually in the past)
I've seen it happen more than once that faculty will later decide that
additional people also should get the file - so they need to be able
to pass on the information themselves. The other difference is we're
going to leave the file up for a set period of time, for this same
reason.

When all is said and done, I would prefer auto-generating passwords though.

Also, Michal was dead-on - generally the recipients will NOT be UW folks.

Regarding bittorrent... I don't see how this is realistic in this
particular circumstance. These certainly are bright people - most will
be EE faculty at other institutions - but in large part they are not
particularly computer savvy. If there's any learning curve involved at
the recipient end, this will not get used. Actually, even if they WERE
computer savvy - if the proposed alternative isn't about as easy as
the behavior we're trying to discourage, people will complain, and it
won't get used. At least that's been my experience...

Travis

\> How about a file submission form that lets users upload their files
> somewhere and asks for the email address of the people who are goign to
> want the file?  Then the file gets stored somewhere on the web server.
> You can hash the recipient address, or something, to create a unique URL
> for each recipient of the file, then your CGI can send email to the
> recipients telling them where they can get the file.  The bonus is you can
> check your web logs to see which recipients have downloaded the file, and
> there is no password protection on the file.
> 
> This way the people sending files only have to learn to use the web
> submission form instead of sending the file in email.  No extra passwords
> or other information required.
> 
> If you really must have passwords on the URLs you could use simple
> authentication (ala htpasswd) and the web submission form could, again,
> use the recipient address to generate a username/password and send it to
> the recipient of the file without the sender ever having to know that one
> even got generated.
> 
> AND you could have a monitor script that checks web logs and deletes files
> as soon as the recipient has downloaded them.