[plug] Linux and ACLs - bit more info!

[Cameron Patrick]

On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 12:06:22PM +0800, Denis Brown wrote:

| Hmmm... fortunately this server will not be in demand 24/7 so I have some
| windows of opportunty to do fsck'ing via a cron job.   I thought I'd heard
| some bad things about XFS - maybe just dreaming.

I have nothing but bad things to say about XFS... if you're going to use
it and care about your data, just make sure you have a UPS and your
machine never ever crashes ;-)  Oh, and get a boot disk with xfsrepair
on it ready, you'll probably need it at some point[2].

In all fairness, they might have improved it in the last year or so, but
even so, I don't intend to go anywhere near XFS again soon.

ext3 Just Works.  I've also been using reiserfs on some machines for the
last few months, and have been pleased with it;  I understand it needs a
seperate kernel patch to support ACLs, though.

| Thanks for that tip, Craig.   This will be a production environment so I'd
| better do my homework well in advance so there are not too many bounces to
| annoy people while I fine tune things.   For admin the GUI might be nice
| but I've grown used to editing config files :-(  

As I understand it there's not much in the way of config files needed -
just man acl/setfacl and go.  I've yet to patch my kernel to support
ACLs, though, so I'm not too sure whether it's really that simple.

I believe you'll need to use a special tar (`apt-get install star' on
Debian) to back up file systems with ACLs.  I don't think that rsync[1]
can cope with ACLs yet either.

| There is a famous quote about that somewhere, isn't there, comparing
| config file editing types with people from the poorer regions of the
| World? :-)

I recall reading a quote about Linux having a command line for the same
reason that Dr Seuss books have words in them - so that adults can use
them too...

Cameron.

[1] Imagine a derisive footnote about unison here.

[2] This is probably good advice for all filesytems, actually.  XFS is
the only fs that I've really needed it for reasons other than hardware
problems or my own stupidity though.  Twice in the short period of time
that I used XFS, the filesystem decided to spontaneously become
unmountable.