[CentOS] LVM chown issues

Thu Aug 31 12:29:31 UTC 2006
William L. Maltby <CentOS4Bill at triad.rr.com>

On Thu, 2006-08-31 at 07:54 -0400, William L. Maltby wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-08-31 at 18:29 +1000, Devraj Mukherjee wrote:
> > Hi Everyone,
> > 
> > I have got CentOS 64bit running on a Dell PowerEdge SC1850 with
> > hardware raid 1. My LVM partions donot seem to honour chown commands
> > for symbolic links. Is this normal? All other files and directories
> > honour it.

Suddenly, this stuck me as being out-of-kilter. Can you demonstrate
this? I went to my /boot, non-LVM, and did this test.

# cd /boot
# ls
boot.b                  initrd-2.6.9-42.0.2.EL.img
 <snip>

# ln -s boot.b myboot.b
# ls -l boot.b myboot.b
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 5824 Feb 21  2005 boot.b
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root    6 Aug 31 08:04 myboot.b -> boot.b
# chown wild-bill myhtl
# ls -l boot.b myboot.b
-rw-r--r--  1 wild-bill root 5824 Feb 21  2005 boot.b
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root      root    6 Aug 31 08:04 myboot.b -> boot.b

The symlink is unchanged. Trying the same on an LVM file.

# cd /tmp
# ls
 <snip>

htl                RowenaSectors01_24    xses-wild-bill.o8P5FC
keyring-fsh1eg     RowenaSectors33_2880
# ln -s htl myhtl
# ls -l *htl*
-rw-rw-r--  1 hardtolove hardtolove 1514 Aug 29 20:59 htl
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root       root          3 Aug 31 08:09 myhtl -> htl
# chown wild-bill myhtl
# ls -l *htl*
-rw-rw-r--  1 wild-bill root 1514 Aug 29 20:59 htl
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root      root    3 Aug 31 08:09 myhtl -> htl

So, here LVM and non-LVM work the same. Any chance that the volume
is mounted ro? Or that the attribute of the logical volume is ro?
I found out there is a bug (IMO) that won't re-read the attribute
until a re-boot (not documented in previous versions, don't know
if it is in current version).

I suspect that I misunderstood your original complaint now.

Either way, another consideration is that basic security concerns
have prevented users other than root from giving files to others for
many years now.

> IIRC, symlinks never take any other ownership or group or permissions.
> <snip>

HTH
--
Bill