[linux-cifs-client] EA support in Linux cifs client

Steven French smfrench at austin.rr.com
Tue Jul 27 03:36:57 GMT 2004


I uploaded code today to the cifs vfs (to the project bk tree) to allow 
query (and listing) Linux xattrs by mapping good old EAs to the user 
category of xattr.   Since Samba now supports EAs this has some 
interesting potential uses, including enabling transparent 
encryption/decryption across the network simply by mounting Mike 
Halcrow's encrypted filesystem on top of the cifs client to view files 
that  are encrypted on the server (and across the wire) but expose their 
decryption mechanism via xattrs.

So far the user xattr to EA mechanism is not useful for querying the 
"System" category of xattrs (such as ACLs) yet but we may be able to 
modify this slightly to handle that as well.

There are two missing pieces left for full xattr support - remove xattr 
and set xattr which I will work on over the next few days.


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