On Sat, 2005-12-10 at 06:35 -0500, Leonard Isham wrote:
hmmm... would this work for SELinux as well?
Unfortunately, no. It only backs up the traditional UNIX and POSIX EA file ACLs, not all POSIX EAs.
That's where you need a good dump of the filesystem that backs up all EAs. According to one person who just recently corrected my ignorance, Ext3 now does this. How well, I can't attest, never used it.
But at least it's now there.
<tangent> It was one of my major gripes about Red Hat not adopting XFS earlier, especially since they are pushing forward on SELinux. I very much agree with the push on SELinux, but to ignore a filesystem that would solve the EA issue and so many other things in 1 swoop almost seems more like a "political" decision.
As much as JFS and ReiserFS users bitch about lack of inclusion, there are major compatibility issues with a lot of their interfaces and things that Red Hat supports. So they can never be included _until_ they address thos. This is not true of XFS, which had quota, POSIX EA/ACL, NFS and countless other support from day 1 in 1999 (and its official 1.0 release in April of 2001) -- things that Ext3 didn't even have (and is still very much lacking in comparison to XFS, especially when it comes to how its dump operates, an on-line repair its fragmentation tool, etc...).
Only now are there issues with 4K stacks and NFS support in kernel 2.6, things that Red Hat could quickly address if it would adopt XFS. I would _never_ use XFS in the stock 2.4 kernel _except_ for the releases that SGI made. </tangent>