SIGUnix Projects

Current Projects

These are projects that SIGUnix is actively pursuing.

ACM Test Network: The first step for our network is to set up a Kerberos KDC and AFS servers. Later, we will also be trying out various ways to set up services such as web and email. To facilitate this, we are planning to have talks on services, security, and scripting languages.

Emersion: Emersion is a presention system that aims to be a good way of displaying slideshow-type presentations, such as those created in Microsoft Powerpoint or KPresenter.

These are projects that have been worked on in semesters past, but are no longer actively being developed by SIGUnix.

BugFixes: The BugFixes project is an attempt to fix some of those less-glorious problems that are around in open-source projects.
LimitGuard: LimitGuard is a bandwidth-monitoring program, designed to help users in University dorm rooms avoid going over the 500 MB bandwidth limit.
paraget: paraget is a parallel-ftp file-fetching program, designed to fetch a single file from multiple mirror sites in parallel by dividing the file up into partitions, thus allowing the client to maximally use its bandwidth.
Gnomon: Gnomon is an attempt to create a modular monitoring system for the Unix desktop using the GTK toolkit.

These are interesting projects members of SIGUnix have discussed, and might be useful for future semesters.

File-change notification: Current Unix systems doesn't supply any way to have a program be notified when a file changes. This would be a useful feature for daemons, biffs, mail programs, file managers and many other programs. We're considering how to add this in a flexible and non-intrusive way to a Unix kernel.
Permission inheritance: As a first kernel hack, we're adding a set of inheritable permissions to the Linux kernel. With this, users will be able to specify, for each directory, a set of permissions that newly created files will have, combined with the usual umask and mode settings. The permissions can either be set as absolute, overriding what the program creating the file wants, or as a minimum.
Emacs quick-peek mode: We're looking into how to add to current Emacs programming modes a way to automatically get prototype information on functions. For instance, if the programmer writes fp = fopen(, then the minibuffer would automatically display the prototype for fopen(). We have some code from Eric M. Ludlam that may form a basis for this.
Dynamic symbolic links: This problem arose out of the problem of multiple users sharing the same filesystem space, particularly in /tmp, where this resource sharing is the cause of many security problems. The idea was to make this filesystem space unique to each user, thereby eliminating the shared-ness of /tmp.