Odd ACL question

[Harti Brandt]

On Mon, 9 Feb 2004, Tim Kientzle wrote:

TK>Harti Brandt wrote:
TK>> On Sun, 8 Feb 2004, Tim Kientzle wrote:
TK>>
TK>> TK>In this case, I'm considering:
TK>> TK>   * If the username exists, use that.
TK>> TK>   * If the username does not exist and the UID is not already in
TK>> TK>       use, issue a warning and use the UID.
TK>> TK>   * If the username exists and the UID conflicts with the local
TK>> TK>       system, ???
TK>> TK>
TK>> TK>This last case is the tough one.  My temptation:  map it to
TK>> TK>an unused UID, issue a warning about the remap, and keep going.
TK>>
TK>> That may cause the problem I described. This may leave a file in a user
TK>> directory that the user cannot delete without intervention of the root
TK>> user, but its probably the simplest solution.
TK>
TK>This would only happen if you are restoring an archive onto
TK>a different system.  If it's the same system, there should be
TK>no UID conflicts and thus no need to remap the UIDs.

Theoretically yes, practically now. In our institute, for example, we make
a backup every day (a incremental of course). People come and go and user
names and ids are never reallocated, but get deleted after some time. So
if you restore a backup that is say, half a year old, you may well have
files that belong to no known user, even if restoring to the same system.

I suppose that mapping them to a well known user (not necessarily
'nobody') and doing some clever 'find' afterwards would find these files.

harti
-- 
harti brandt,
http://www.fokus.fraunhofer.de/research/cc/cats/employees/hartmut.brandt/private
brandt at fokus.fraunhofer.de, harti at freebsd.org