Subject: Re: Helping Out
From: Marc J. Miller (itlm019@mailbox.ucdavis.edu)
Date: Sat Feb 24 2001 - 15:23:53 EST
At 12:41 PM 2/24/01 -0500, Chip Mefford wrote:
>On Sat, 24 Feb 2001, Daniel E. Lautenschleger wrote:
>
> > I think many folks would like to see dropkludge,
>
>What's Dropkludge? I assume it is some kludge to mimic the
>AppleShare Server "drop box" world write/owner rwx thingee.
That's how it started... I eventually discovered that the same permission
handling that was preventing Dropboxes from working was also creating other
bugs. So I made the changes universal. It not only maintains rwx
permissions, but it also makes sure that every file created within a
directory has the same owner and group as the directory itself. That's
what Mac expects. Unfortunately, I've run into a couple of difficulties --
a known security hole which is extremely well-documented on Sourceforge
(check the DocManager) and a difficulty that when someone drops a folder
into a dropbox, the dropped folder also becomes a dropbox, owned by whoever
dropped it there. That's related to the setgid being set on the dropbox
and permission inheritance.
>This would be very nice, but it seems a bit strange. I simply
>gave up and created a directory below home with subdirs for all
>my users with group rw for "users" and symlinked it to the home
>directories. Make a little script to add it automagicly at user
>creation time. Everyone of course can read everyone elses "drop
>box" but that makes it no different from those mailboxes up at
>the receptionists desk.
I'm glad that works for you. I created dropkludge to deal with student
homework submission, so a situation where everyone can read everyone else's
stuff simply wasn't acceptable. But as I say, there were certain issues I
simply couldn't figure out how to resolve. I'm not completely out of
ideas, but I *am* out of time.
> >a DID database,
>
>What's a DID database?
AppleShare tracks directories by directory ID number. Trouble is,
originally when afpd initialized, it would assign those DIDs and therefore
every time afpd restarted, the DIDs would change. A database to store
those DIDs was created to make those assignments more permanent, but I
understand its less than perfect.
> >and the
> > feature that allows files created in netatalk volumes to have the same
> > ownership and permissions as the parent (correct)?
>
>Yes, that would be really nice, but again, by setting the sticky bit
>for group, and having folks "copy" over onto the server rather than
>creating on the server, this seems to work out okay.
The sticky bit and the file ownership changes are part of dropkludge as
described above.
> > Maybe a "hit list" of items that need fixing by v1.5 release?
We have a TODO list in the CVS. That seems like a good starting point...
perhaps someone (Jeff?!) could update the bug tracker with some of the info
there and decide what bugs are critical, what bugs could wait for now, etc.
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