ACLs in 2.2 for non-ACL aware file systems

[Christopher R. Hertel]

This would only work if one could guarantee that no one would access the 
files directly.  That is, via FFS or MFS.  Their would need to be a 
guarantee that the filesystem could only be accessed via Samba otherwise 
the ACLs would not be maintained in sync with the files in the filesystem.

Having said that I can imagine products, such as appliance boxes, that 
could make such a guarantee.  So someone could write a VFS layer that 
used FFS, MFS, EXT2, or whatever and stored the ACL information in a file 
on that underlying filesystem.

Several months ago I suggested something like this, but at a lower layer. 
The idea was to write a wrapper filesystem on top of something like EXT2
or BSD FFS, and then mount the wrapper instead of the underlying system.  
My hope was that tools that operate on the underlying system (fsck, etc.) 
would not have to be completely rewitten in order to operate on the 
layered OS.

Chris -)-----

[Charset iso-8859-1 unsupported, filtering to ASCII...]
> 
> Does anyone know if there is any work being done on ACL management for file
> systems such as FFS or RAM Disk file systems (such as MFS) that don't know
> anything other than standard UNIX ACL control? I'd imagine the ACL meta-data
> would have to be stored in files that would not be 'seen' by any client
> (i.e. Samba wouldn't offer them as part of the directory list).
> 
> Many thanks,
> 
> Craig Hughes
> 
> 


-- 
Christopher R. Hertel -)-----                   University of Minnesota
crh at nts.umn.edu              Networking and Telecommunications Services

    Ideals are like stars; you will not succeed in touching them
    with your hands...you choose them as your guides, and following
    them you will reach your destiny.  --Carl Schultz