Re: [autofs] [RFC] Towards a Modern Autofs

[Mike Waychison <Michael.Waychison@Sun.COM>]

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H. Peter Anvin wrote:

>Mike Waychison wrote:
>  
>
>>H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>My point is that it's what you get for having an automounter.
>>>
>>>We can't solve Sun's designed-in braindamage, unfortunately.  This is
>>>partially why I'd like people to consider the scope of what automounting
>>>does; there are tons of policy issues not all of which are going to be
>>>appropriate in all contexts.  To some degree, if you have to have an
>>>automounter you have already lost.
>>> 
>>>      
>>>
>>However, we can solve Linux's designed-in braindamage.
>>
>>    
>>
>
>I was referring to the visibility of server-side mount points in NFS 2/3
>and the fact that most of the uses of the automounter is to work around
>this shortcoming.  This is a protocol limitation.
>
>  
>
It's just a different way of looking at it.   NFS exports filesystems,  
not namespaces.  It's the server implementation that decides it should 
try to map these exports to its local namespace.  Indeed, this is what 
exportfs and /etc/exports tries to do.  Nobody said this mapping made 
alot of sense.

>(Don't get me started on stuff like "plus lines" in map, which breaks
>the map paradigm completely.  That's brokenness on a whole other level,
>but which can be reasonably ignored.)
>
>  
>
Your on your own on that one.  I don't see it as an issue as the 
semantics are pretty well defined.

>It's trivial to crash most filesystem drivers (or get to a security leak
>level) by feeding them deliberately bad input.  Robustness against
>corruption in Linux has been with respect to likely data corruption much
>more than deliberate attacks.  It's a major effort; security-auditing
>every filesystem driver.
>  
>
Ok.  Thanks for clearing that up. 

-- 
Mike Waychison
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
1 (650) 352-5299 voice
1 (416) 202-8336 voice
mailto: Michael.Waychison@Sun.COM
http://www.sun.com

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