Re: [RFC v3 42/45] nfs: Add richacl support

["Andreas Grünbacher" <andreas.gruenbacher@gmail.com>]

2015-05-29 17:24 GMT+02:00 Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@primarydata.com>:
>> It seems unreasonable to me to expect applications other than special file
>> system maintenance tools to cater to such file system differences; there are
>> just too many file systems out there for that to work. Instead, it
>> would be better
>> to use an interface that can be generalized across file systems.
>
> My point is that system.richacl is not such an interface. It can only
> ever work for local filesystems that understand and store local uids
> and gids. It has no support for the remote users/groups that are
> stored on your NFS/SMB server unless they happen to have a local
> mapping into uids and gids, and so the API is inappropriate to replace
> the existing NFSv4 acl API on the client.

That can be changed if we find a reasonable solution.

>>> The problem is that you are 100% reliant on an accurate idmapper in
>>> order to convert the name@domain to a _correct_ uid/gid. It isn't
>>> sufficient to convert to just any valid uid/gid, because if your ACL
>>> tool is trying to edit the ACL, you can end up converting all those
>>> DENY modes for user 'Johnny_Rotten@blackhats.are.us' into DENY modes
>>> for user 'nobody'.
>>> ...and yes, libnfsidmap will happily convert all unknown
>>> user/groupnames into whatever uid/gid corresponds to 'nobody' without
>>> returning an error.
>>
>> That's indeed a problem, and I can think of two ways of addressing it:
>>
>> First, acl editors need to be careful about nobody entries; they need to be
>> aware that nobody could actually stand for somebody else. (We could map
>> unmappable users and groups to something else than nobody, but that
>> might just shift the problem without improve anything.)
>
> What is the editor supposed to do about an entry it cannot even
> interpret, let alone store back to the server?

In the end, it will have to be a user decision what to do about such entries,
the editor can warn the user and make it harder to make mistakes though.

>> Second, we could add support for passing through unmappable Who values
>> as is. But that raises the problem of how to pass thtough and represent
>> different kinds of identifiers: NFSv4 users user@domain and group@domain
>> strings; smb users SIDs; maybe more.
>
> Now you have a mixture of some stuff that is being translated into
> local uid/gid format and therefore needs translating back when you're
> going to update the ACL, and some stuff that is not. What is the value
> of doing the mapping here?

If you don't translate, you cannot copy the permissions to another file
system. In the ideal case, everything can be translated; where that fails,
the user probably wants to know.

Thanks,
Andreas