Nicolas Williams' source environment variables

[David Lee]

On Thu, 3 Feb 2000, Nicolas Williams wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 02, 2000 at 07:25:34AM -0800, Dan Kaminsky wrote:
> > [...]
> > Incidentally, I absolutely love having a global config that I use as a
> > skeleton for shares that lie within.
> 
> You do this too?
> 
> We have a global config file that sets a handful of globals (many, such
> as 'netbios name', 'interfaces' and such from environment variables).
> 
> For standard home directories we have a standard sub-config file that
> defines the home share stuff.
> 
> For all shares we have template sub-config files to setup various
> different kinds of shares (private, group shared private, group shared
> public).

For this particular aspect, have you seen the "inherit permissions" option
in the pre-release 2.0.7 ?  This is potentially very powerful for
subdirectory trees requiring different default permissions and
group-owners to be inherited.

For instance given a single home share, one could have
  (711) drwx--x--x   me  mygroup    .
  (755) drwxr-xr-x   me  mygroup  public_html
  (750) drwxr-x---   me  mygroup  group_readable
  (770) drwxrwx---   me  mygroup  group_writeable
 (2770) drwxrws---   me  othergp  group_writeable_and_group_owner_override
  ... et cetera ...

All from a single share: new files and subdirs inherit permissions from
their immediate parent.  No need for administrative (user and sys.admin)
complexity of multiple shares: all directly under end-user control (very
useful when there are thousands of them!)

That's not to argue against the evolving environment/scripting ideas, but
simply to mention that this particular example can be handled very often
(nearly always?), and cleanly, by existing (almost) functionality.

(I ought to admit to a bias (aka "declare an interest"): the "inherit
permissions" idea was from me (see archives in September).)

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