Re: mtree acl support

On Jan 16, 2014, at 12:36 PM, Mark Felder <feld_at_freebsd.org> wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 15, 2014, at 23:11, Tim Kientzle wrote:
>> 
>> On Jan 14, 2014, at 6:47 AM, Mark Felder <feld_at_freebsd.org> wrote:
>> 
>>> I was recently talking to someone about how one would backup / restore
>>> ACLs reliably. I didn't see any mention of ACLs in the mtree man page
>>> and after a quick google I came upon this old mailing list post:
>>> 
>>> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2008-April/024173.html
>>> 
>>> patch in list is here: http://heka.cenkes.org/sat/diffs/mtree_acl.diff
>>> I've mirrored it here: https://feld.me/freebsd/mtree_acl.diff
>>> 
>>> This old patch appears to still apply cleanly. I hate to see a patch die
>>> and be forgotten.
>> 
>> One problem that ‘tar’ has addressed (inspired by Joerg Schilling’s
>> work on star) is to permit ACLs to be restored even if the user database
>> is out of date.
>> 
>> This is done by including a fourth field in each ACE with the
>> numeric user ID.
>> 
>> I suspect you want to do the same for mtree.  I thought
>> I remembered acl_to_text having an option to use
>> an extended text format, so it might be a trivial change.
>> 
> 
> As long as it's not default. One of the most convenient ways to change a
> user's UID (or multiple users!) is to do an mtree backup, change
> UID/GID, and then re-apply mtree backup. Every file that the user(s)
> previously owned will be automatically changed to the new UID/GID for
> you :-)

The extended format stores both name and numeric ID.

It tries to restore by name first (looking up as necessary), then falls back on ID if that fails.

So this does correctly handle your case.

This also lets you restore trees when user lookups are unavailable.  For example, user lookups may be broken because of permission problems that you’re trying to fix with mtree.  ;-)

Tim