MVFS owner/group & permissions

[Andrew DeFaria]

Andrzej Ostruszka wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 14 (2005), Igor Pechtchanski wrote:
>
>> First question: do you have both "ntsec" and "smbntsec" on?
>
> Not until you've asked :). I'm not sure where it should be set so I 
> set it in: Control_Panel->System->Advanced->Env_vars and I do see it 
> in the subsequent shell invocations:
>
> aao014@aao014-01 ~
> $ echo "->$CYGWIN<-"
> ->ntsec smbntsec<-

Make sure you set it in the System Variables not the User Variables. The 
difference is that System Variables get set before you log in and thus 
this setting will be available to services that start before you log in. 
Note a change to the System Variables will not take effect until you 
reboot the system since the System environment is only build at boot time.

>> If you *do* have it set, does Windows show different owner and 
>> permissions via pure Windows means (i.e., the "Advanced" security 
>> properties in Windows Explorer)?
>
> Well, if I choose the Properties item in the Windows Explorer I've got 
> only two tabs: General and ClearCase 

That's because you are looking at an element in a Dynamic view. I 
believe snapshot views would be like regular NTFS oriented files. But 
you are questioning MVFS permissions which relates to dynamic views.

> and from the later I can view ClearCase properties. But what I'm 
> really after is not in there. I have to choose in Windows Explorer not 
> Properties but Clearcase->Properties of Element->Protection(tab) and 
> in there I've got owner, group and other with appropriate permissions.

Yes. Clearcase permissions (i.e. Properties of Element) are the 
Clearcase mode (i.e. permission bits) and owner and group of the 
element. MVFS has it's own set of permissions and is separate from NTFS.

Still I believe with ntsec and smbntsec a Cygwin ls should show the 
proper owners and group which is what I suspect you want.

>> Basically, Cygwin can only do as much as the underlying Windows 
>> permits it to. If the underlying Windows doesn't recognize MVFS owner 
>> and attributes, it's unlikely that Cygwin will. If Windows does show 
>> the correct permissions and Cygwin doesn't (and "ntsec/smbntsec" are 
>> both on), it's probably a bug, and will have to be debugged/fixed (if 
>> it can't be
>> reproduced by the Cygwin developers, you'll need to help in debugging 
>> it on your machine).
>
> If I've set the ntsec and smbntsec correctly then I guess I've got no 
> chance to get what I wanted - am I right?

Alas, I have no Clearcase and XP anymore to do testing however I believe 
that if what you want is to see the owner and group from a Cygwin ls 
then you'll need to set ntsec and smbntsec at a minimum. While MVFS does 
have it's own owner and group it also does present the underlying OS 
with that information.

> Is there a simple way to recognize the filesystem you're in? 

No, not really. You could "guess" that if you are on a file system that 
is remote (using df) that it's an MVFS file system. But that's not 
guaranteed. You could check for the M drive - but that's not guaranteed 
either.

Besides, IIRC you should be able to get the owner/group out of ls. I 
doubt that the permissions will be correct. I forget now but there was 
something about checked out vs. not checked out and it didn't seem to 
follow a pattern that I thought was natural.

> That way I could make a function that does normal ls and wraps e.g. 
> the "cleartool describe" command if inside of MVFS.

Well you could always wrap ls, try the cleartool describe and check for 
failure, being careful to properly /dev/null that which you didn't want 
to see. Seems like a very heavy handed way to cripple ls though.

> Will it be of any interest for the Cygwin to have some sort of plugins 
> (so that I can write some extension which will be used e.g. for 
> deciding the permissions of foreing filesystems).

Again, I think you would be better served to work on why you are not 
getting the proper owner/groups already. First take MVFS out of the 
picture. If another user creates a file on a share and you go to it in 
Cygwin and ls -l it do you see him as the owner? Is ntsec and smbntsec 
set? Does his user ID appear in your /etc/passwd? Once you can get that 
working then switch to MVFS and try again. Clearcase must offer up some 
owner and group to the underlying OS to display for the file.

BTW: Most people implement a trigger to change the ownership of any and 
all elements to that of the vob owner. This has the intended side effect 
of not allowing people to indiscriminately do cleartool rmelem.
-- 
Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.


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