Re: what's next for the linux kernel?

[Marc Perkel <marc@perkel.com>]

Bodo Eggert wrote:

>Marc Perkel <marc@perkel.com> wrote:
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>[...]
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>>I'll run through a few ideas here.
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>>Novell Netware type permissions. ACLs are a step in the right direction
>>but Linux isn't any where near where Novell was back in 1990. Linux lets
>>you - for example - to delete files that you have no read or write
>>access rights to.
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>It lets you unlink them. That's different from deleting, since the owner
>may have his/her private link to that file.
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>Unlinking is changing the contents of a directory, and it's controlled by
>the write permission of the containing directory.
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There would be different rights to eack link.

>>Netware on the other hand prevents you from deleting
>>files that you can't write to and if you have no right it is as if the
>>file isn't there.
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>Imagine a /tmp directory (writable by world) with user "a" creating a file
>"foo", umask=077 and user "b" trying to do the same. User "b" will get
>'file exists' if he tries to create it, and 'file does not exist' if he
>tries to list it. He will go nuts.
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Users should have private temp directory space. Two user trying to 
create the same file in the same directory isn't going to work under any 
operating system.

>BTW: YANI: That about a tmpfs where all-numerical entries can only be
>created by the corresponding UID? This would provide a secure, private
>tmp directory to each user without the possibility of races and denial-of-
>service attacks. Maybe it should be controlled by a mount flag.
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>>You can't even see it in the directory. Netware also
>>has inherited permissions like Windows and Samba has and this is doing
>>it right.
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>You can't do that if you have hardlinks. However, I missed the feature of
>overruling file permissions in some special directories, e.g. anything
>put under /pub should ignore umask and be a+rX.
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You have to realize the Netware does things differently and that Linux 
limitations don't apply to Netware.

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>>File systems and individual directories should be able to be
>>flagged as casesensitive/insensitive.
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>IMHO not needed.
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But just because you don't need it doesn't mean other people don't. If 
you are running Samba pretending to be a case insensitive file system 
then this is a good feature.