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

[Bert Obbink <bert.obbink@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Adam Tauno Williams wrote:

> >>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.

I am not certain any more, its to long ago (1989). I have contacted the sysadmin who was responsible at that time for most of the systems, but he can't remember either. We both believe the acl's were in a separate database. Tapes could be made and read by tar and/or cpio. Afterwards some acl command could be applied to write the acls to files read-in. I suppose there was a special backup command for the
acl tree. I might be possible that there is some Aegis systemadmin book available somewhere. But that can take some time to locate. We both have joined different employers. So before I start such a search I really would like to know if the need for this information is critical, because it will take some time and quite some efford.

Please let me know how urgent this information to you is.

gr. Bert.