Although I was not involved with the specification of CIFS, nor with the
design or implementation of CIFS on open systems, I respectfully
disagree with at least some of your conclusions. In a top-down entity
(totalitarian dictatorship, clandestine or military service,
corporation, authoritarian theocracy, etc), the designated decision
maker/s decides as to what is allowed or not, including not permitting
backward compatibility. Would ignoring a protection mode enhance
security by imposing a different access and security model? Perhaps, or
even definitely yes. However, the fact stated by the posting person
that SuSE did emulate a perhaps-obsolete security model under a
subsequent security model does seem to indicate that SuSE had a more
universal implementation of backward compatibility than what was
observed with EL. If the posting was in error and SuSE does not permit
such backward compatibility (perhaps with a warning message), then SuSE
as well as EL is not backward compatible.
On 8/17/21 8:56 PM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
On Tue, Aug 17, 2021 at 11:21 AM Yasha Karant <ykar...@gmail.com> wrote:
This is a poor design decision on the part of the Linux systems
implementers, as it breaks backward compatibility. There is no reason
that an "auto-translator" from CIFS to what has been used in
unix/BSD/linux for a very long time should not have been implemented.
Please do not say why work should have been done that you haven't
tried to do yourself. CIFS, for example, supports multiple layers of
both username and group based permissions, with more complex
inheritance, ordered layers of "permit" and "deny" for each user or
group, and considerable awkwardness resolving them that costs
development, time, resources, and can cost a lot of tearing out of
hair when trying to transform it to POSIX style permissions.
CIFS was not designed for UNIX. It was designed for Windows
file-sharing, which has quite a few different distinctions due to the
previous VFAT or more modern NTFS filesystems which underly windows
filesystems and their capabilities.
NFSv4 ACL's come close to these permissions, but managing those in the
Linux world is a serious pain in the ass. Samba does a pretty good of
transforming underlying POSIX filesystems into CIFS compatible access,
Although this practice is not uncommon in the profiteer sector as
planned obsolescence for cash flow and other fiscal measures dominate,
and for which the customers have very little control (the typical EULA
is similar to the Godfather's offer you cannot refuse), it should be
different in the open systems source code sector. Has anyone written a
script that converts "old" into CIFS?
CIFS is not the server. CIFS is the protocol. If the setups of the
server has changed, that's the server or the server configuration.
You'll need to negotiate that with the server admins.
