Re: [PATCH 0/2] Support for Numeric Representations of UIDs and GIDs.

["J. Bruce Fields" <bfields@fieldses.org>]

On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 03:09:52PM -0400, Steve Dickson wrote:
> 
> 
> On 08/18/2010 02:20 PM, J. Bruce Fields wrote:
> > On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 03:38:43PM -0400, Steve Dickson wrote:
> >> In recent NFS v2/v3 to v4 transitions, one of the sticking 
> >> points have been that fact v4 uses strings in the format
> >> of "user@domain" instead of 32bit integers for uids and 
> >> gids.
> >>
> >> When the string can not be mapped, its mapped to the 'nobody'
> >> user which is not optimal for things like backup servers and
> >> such where the ids will not be know by both sides.
> >>
> >> So this patch series enables the server to send out numeric 
> >> string of uids and gids that do not have the '@domain' part.
> >> The series also adds functionality to the client that parse these
> >> type of strings and will use the numeric representation
> >> of the ids iff the id exists on the client, which is 
> >> sightly different that Solaris. Solaris dose not have that
> >> "id must exist" restriction.
> > 
> > Why did you decide to impose that restriction?
> I just thought it made sense, from a security standpoint to make sure the 
> ids were at least valid on the client...  if they are not valid the id 
> becomes 'nobody' which how it works today... but is different than how 
> OpenSolaris does it... they just use whatever the server tells to... 

If we don't have a strong reason to do something different, let's just
do the same as OpenSolaris and save any restrictions for the
client-to-server (acl/owner-setting) path.

--b.