[1029] in Moira
chowning a volume to a gid
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathon Weiss)
Tue Dec 10 23:57:06 1996
From: Jonathon Weiss <jweiss@MIT.EDU>
To: afsdev@MIT.EDU
Cc: moiradev@MIT.EDU
Date: Tue, 10 Dec 1996 23:55:35 EST
In order for a volume to have an owner, such that someone besides
system:administrators has implicit 'a' rights to fix acl screwups in
the volume, the mountpoint for the volume has to be chowned to the
relevant uid. This is not a problem. However, there are some volumes
(generally project volumes, and activity lockers, etc.) where we would
prefer to give the implicit 'a' access to a group, because we don't
want to have to have someone on s:a chown the volume every time the
relevant person leaves a project, or student group. It turns out that
if you chown the mountpoint to an AFS gid (which are < 0) it does
this. Under ultrix, it is not possible to do this with chown, but
using perl or something else that uses the chown() system call works.
Unfortunately, the same is not true of Solaris. Since we are hoping
to migrate moira to a Solaris machine (and it does the chowning when
it creates a volume) we need a new way of doing this from a Solaris
machine. It was suggested that it might not be too hard to write a
program that was able to make the necessary afs calls without going
thru the cache manager. Can anyone with more AFS programming
experience than me tell me if this is feasable, or better yet write
such a program?
I believe this is the last major hurdle to getting moira working on a
Solaris machine. Unfortunately, we'd like to do the upgrade sometime
in early January (before IAP starts) so there isn't a lot of time here
(which is mostly my fault for not sending this sooner.)
Jonathon
