[OpenAFS-devel] device nodes...

[Jeffrey Hutzelman]

On 25 Feb 2001, Love wrote:

> Jeffrey Hutzelman <jhutz@cmu.edu> writes:
> 
> > In order to come close to being safe, I would propose something like the
> > following, if device nodes are to be supported at all...
> > 
> > Device nodes are represented in AFS as magic symlinks, in the same way
> > as mount points.  
> > [...]
> 
> When do you need device-nodes in AFS space ? I would guess that you'll need
> them in chroot()ed enviroments like for ftpd on solaris. Then you'll need
> to take lookups of you magic-device-symlinks outside your chroot()ed
> environment, I no not find that very attractive.

It doesn't sound like you read my proposal carefully enough.  The point of
magic-device-symlinks is that they don't refer to device files; they refer
to entries in a device table loaded at startup.  Entries in this table
consist of device numbers, owner, group, and mode, and are controlled by
the system administrator.  There are no extra file accesses involved. 

Further, if you're worried about AFS accessing files outside a chroot()'d
environment, then give up and never use AFS that way.  Unless you use an
in-memory cache, every AFS file access is going to touch a file outside
the chroot()'d environment.

-- Jeff