Hey Pluggers,
The only think I hate worse than unscheduled downtime is data loss, and I
have a situation where it would be very easy to accidentally destroy a lot
of data very quickly. I'd like to see if anyone has a clever idea about
preventing this from happening.
Here's the situation:
1) I have a current Linux system running as a host to virtual machines.
2) I have a hardware RAID (call it /dev/sdb) holding many terabytes of data.
3) /dev/sdb has no partition table, and is formatted as an entire-disk file
system, if that matters
4) /dev/sdb is attached to one of the virtual machines (also current Linux),
which reads and writes files on /dev/sdb regularly
So far, so good, and everything works. Here's the scenario I'm worried
about: an accidental mount of /dev/sdb on the host system, either via
typing in the wrong window or during some maintenance task when the virtual
machine is thought to be shut down but isn't, will corrupt that file system
and lead to the possible loss of all those terabytes of data.
Yes, I have backups (which might take days to restore), and yes there's a
chance I could recover some or all of the data with various tools, but those
are fixing a problem. I want to avoid the problem altogether. Can any of
you think of a clever way to provide a layer of protection around opening
the device from the host level? SELinux, perhaps?
-Brian
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