[CentOS] Tools/mechanisms for the management of access permissions in big filebased datasets

[Leroy Tennison]

Well, there are extended ACLs if they're available in CentOS, when I first worked with them (long ago) they were new (and on a different Distro).  I hope support for them has improved.  They allow multiple users/groups to be assigned permissions to a file/directory.  The problem then was that chmod (and other programs) were not extended-ACL-aware and could over-ride extended ACLs.  There was a mechanism to recover from the situation but what it basically came down to was eternal vigilance - the system administrators had to understand (and agree about) extended ACLs and be careful/diligent in applying them.  There are hacks which could possibly help (rename chmod and replace it with a script warning about extended ACLs) but, in the final analysis, it's not a decision to be undertaken lightly (unless the situation has changed dramatically).


Leroy Tennison
Network Information/Cyber Security Specialist
E: leroy at datavoiceint.com
2220 Bush Dr
McKinney, Texas
75070
www.datavoiceint.com
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________________________________________
From: CentOS <centos-bounces at centos.org> on behalf of Frank Thommen <list.centos at drosera.ch>
Sent: Tuesday, November 27, 2018 7:25 AM
To: CentOS mailing list
Subject: [EXTERNAL] [CentOS] Tools/mechanisms for the management of access permissions in big filebased datasets

Hello,

we are currently managing access permissions through classical
user-group-others permissions on a multi-petabyte directory tree with
partially very deep and broad directories.  Projects are represented by
directory trees and mapped through GIDs.  Lately we had lots of
"singular" permission request (one single user needs access to a single
dataset but should not be able to see all other datasets belonging to
the same project).  We realized, that the UGO model doesn't scale and is
becoming more and more unmanageable.

Can you recommend tools/mechanisms/technologies to overcome the
drawbacks of the UGO model?  We are thinking about some purely ACL based
mechanism (but are open to other ideas).  All filesystems in question
are mounted via NFSv4 and the clients are (almost) completely CentOS 7.x
hsots.  Ideally the tool would have some web UI and some kind of
(REST)API which allows us to modify permissions from our inhouse data
management application (which does /not/ manage permissions, just the
structure of the data).  Additionally it should be able to
visualize/report permissions in directory.

I wasn't very successful in googling possible candidates, hence the
question to the list.

Cheers
frank


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