Re: Filesystems -- was: Linux in a School envrionment

[Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>And how does one backup a filesystem containing ACLs?
>Yes I have. But it is was on a Apollo system running the Aegis operatingsystem. 
>Still one of the most fancy systems I ever worked with... But then came HP and took 
>over Apollo systems.
>But the trick was there was a super-super user called locksmith. This user had 
>access to everything. You could not lockout locksmith from any file. Root was just 
>a user who was under control of the acl. Basicly one could make every user sysadmin 
>just by placing it in the right group. If I remember well locksmith wasn't in the 
>password or shadow file either, but I am not sure here. For making
>backups you had to add the cpio-user to all the files were access was needed.
>System backups were made by locksmith.

Interesting,  but how do the ACLs themselves get backed up? (So that they get restored like standard file permissions).   It seems your backup utility would have to know about how to process and ACL, and tar and its ilck certainly don't.  This is one reason I like the trustee system, where ACL's are seperate from the filesystem and stored in a file, but that doesn't seem to be where things are going.