On Thursday 26 August 2010 11:56:41 Tim Nelson wrote:
ACL's do indeed look like the method I'd prefer. Are ACL's part of the filesystem (dependent on ext{2,3,4} etc?) or are they part of the file/inode? My primary reason for asking is I'd like to know if when backing up this data, will the ACL's be included in the backup or will they be lost?
Yes, they are part of the filesystem's extended attributes and you are right: you need to make sure the tools you use to backup/restore are "aware" of these extended attributes. AFAIK, the "tar" command on CentOS 5 is not aware of these and you need to use one called "star". Check that one.
You could still use your backup program or the regular tar command along with "getfacl -R" to create a text dump of all the permissions (so that you can easily reapply them when you untar/restore on the destination filesystem).
HTH, Jorge