I was in college in the mid 1990's. Our school had hundreds of Unix workstations from Sun, HP, DEC, IBM, and SGI. Everything was tied together with MIT's Project Athena which used the AFS Andrew File System, Kerberos, and the Zephyr instant messaging system.
Your home dir would be mounted as /school/login
The directory paths would be really long like /afs/school/math/maple/maple5.3 so there were 2 commands named add and attach to mount dirs to /school
add maple5.3 and you would have /school/maple5.3 and it would source .environment script in that dir to set up the tool and it /school/maple5.3/bin to your PATH
The attach command did the same thing but did NOT source the .environment file
If you needed to access another student's dir it was explicitly written in the intro computing class book to use attach and not add
I had a lot of scripts and utilities that friends would use. They told other random people that I didn't know.
So of course I made a file that would be updated any time I logged in showing my current machine name. Then I made a .environment file that would xhost + my_machine and send me a Zephyr message saying "I just added and xhosted your machine"
I would wait a few minutes and then run xflip and xmeltdown and set the -display to their machine. If they were in the same computer lab as me I would see them start to freak out. These programs basically froze your display for a few seconds while inverting the screen or causing everything to appear to melt to the bottom.
for OS class we had to write a distributed game on top of the Andrew File System; debugging a nasty crash I managed to distill our team's code down to 10 lines to remotely crash/reboot any chosen AFS workstation on campus; thus I regularly emptied workstation rooms at CMU (most students just gave up after a couple of sudden computer reboots) so that CS friends could work on and finish their homework; I may have also crashed some professor workstations from time to time, idk
For the last 25 years at 8 different jobs everything is over NFS. Every company uses Unix groups and some have used groups to manage project access. Sometimes it can take 3 days to get added to a group.
When I started college in 1993 we learned in the "Intro to Computing Environment" class our first semester how to create ACL groups.
I have a degree in computer engineering so I understand binary, octal, hexadecimal, but chmod 755 or 644 or whatever is not exactly intuitive.
AFS permissions are much easier to understand. When we had a group project we would all make a directory for that project and only give access to the other people in our group. We could give them read or write and everything worked great.
I know NFSv4 has ACL support but I've never seen it actually used anywhere.
Your home dir would be mounted as /school/login
The directory paths would be really long like /afs/school/math/maple/maple5.3 so there were 2 commands named add and attach to mount dirs to /school
add maple5.3 and you would have /school/maple5.3 and it would source .environment script in that dir to set up the tool and it /school/maple5.3/bin to your PATH
The attach command did the same thing but did NOT source the .environment file
If you needed to access another student's dir it was explicitly written in the intro computing class book to use attach and not add
I had a lot of scripts and utilities that friends would use. They told other random people that I didn't know.
So of course I made a file that would be updated any time I logged in showing my current machine name. Then I made a .environment file that would xhost + my_machine and send me a Zephyr message saying "I just added and xhosted your machine"
I would wait a few minutes and then run xflip and xmeltdown and set the -display to their machine. If they were in the same computer lab as me I would see them start to freak out. These programs basically froze your display for a few seconds while inverting the screen or causing everything to appear to melt to the bottom.
https://github.com/veltzer/xmeltdown
No real harm but it was pretty funny when I was 19