From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S263698AbTDIT1p (for ); Wed, 9 Apr 2003 15:27:45 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S263709AbTDIT1p (for ); Wed, 9 Apr 2003 15:27:45 -0400 Received: from DELFT.AURA.CS.CMU.EDU ([128.2.206.88]:41929 "EHLO delft.aura.cs.cmu.edu") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S263698AbTDIT1l (for ); Wed, 9 Apr 2003 15:27:41 -0400 Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2003 15:39:03 -0400 To: David Howells Cc: torvalds@transmeta.com, mingo@redhat.com, arjanv@redhat.com, alan@redhat.com, viro@math.psu.edu, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: Linux authentication / credential management Message-ID: <20030409193903.GA31944@delft.aura.cs.cmu.edu> Mail-Followup-To: David Howells , torvalds@transmeta.com, mingo@redhat.com, arjanv@redhat.com, alan@redhat.com, viro@math.psu.edu, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org References: <3946.1049901134@warthog.warthog> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <3946.1049901134@warthog.warthog> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.3i From: Jan Harkes Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Wed, Apr 09, 2003 at 04:12:14PM +0100, David Howells wrote: > The first part of what I'm thinking of is a structure like the > following that has a Process Authentication Group ID and a list of > authentication tokens for filesystems such as AFS & NFSv4 kerberos > keys, NTFS ACLs, SAMBA login details. PAGs have been proposed over and over again and there is one fundamental problem, my PAG isn't your PAG. (although in this specific case, if you're looking at it with the AFS hat it probably is). Some people want to have an authentication identifier they can keep synchronized across a cluster, so they want to be able to set the 'PAG' to any arbitrary value. However Coda (and AFS) prefer to have something that just guarantees to be a unique identifier for a group of related tasks (aka. newpag). Allowing someone to set the pag in this case nullifies the usefulness of the tag because there is no guarantee that it is unique. It would be similar to allowing someone to specify their own process id. What happened to your 'task ornaments', I figured that that would have been the best way to tag processes with information and allow individual filesystems to define their own preferred semantics. http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0201.3/0480.html Jan