Current approaches to ACL handling

[ronnie sahlberg]

On Mon, Oct 1, 2012 at 11:57 AM, Christopher R. Hertel <crh at ubiqx.mn.org> wrote:
> On 10/01/2012 01:52 PM, Jeremy Allison wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Oct 01, 2012 at 02:42:51PM -0400, simo wrote:
>>>
>>> On Mon, 2012-10-01 at 13:28 -0500, Christopher R. Hertel wrote:
>>>>
>>>> What are the current best practices for ACL handling?
>>>>
>>>> To my knowledge, it's using EAs to store the ACLs.  Is there any
>>>> in-depth
>>>> documentation on this implementation?  Are there any other mechanisms in
>>>> use?
>>>
>>>
>>> We store the Windows ACL in an EA and a matching posix ACL translation
>>> on the file, plus a sha hash of the ACL so we can be sure they are in
>>> sync.
>>>
>>> I am not aware of any other doc beyond the code.
>>
>>
>> Well there are some SambaXP talks on it I did a while ago :-).
>>
>> Sorry.
>
>
> I'll look at the code and your talks.  Those are the kinds of pointers I
> needed.
>
> Is there any reason to even consider the possibility of thinking about
> pondering the idea of toying with the concept of somehow using TDB (CTDB) to
> manage ACLs, or is that not a particularly rational approach?

I think TDBs would be problematic since with one permanent record for
each file, and say
a few billion files, the TDB would become huge. As in >>TB size huge.

You would also have the problem of single point of failure.  That TDB
file goes bad, you now lost all ACLs for all your files.