Nfs – How to use POSIX ACLs on an NFSv4 mount in Linux

access-control-listnfsnfs4

I have recently transitioned a Linux fileserver from offering only NFS v3 to also offering NFS v4. All of our clients happily started using NFS v4 automatically. Unfortunately, this effectively broke ACL management for the handful of users that use them, since the POSIX tools they're used to no longer work. (Worse, ls no longer indicates files that have ACLs, so they're more hidden than they used to be.)

I'm getting pushback from the users who don't want to learn new tools just because our storage system changed software (plus the fileserver is actually storing the ACLs on disk as POSIX ACLs, so the transition to NFSv4 ACLs feels a little silly, what with every system involved running some variant of Linux).

I can just force the clients to use NFS v3 for the users who don't want to learn NFSv4 ACLs, but is there a way to run NFS v4 clients but have the POSIX ACL programs work? Preferably without straying too far from the distribution's standard repositories.

The clients are running Fedora. (Currently they're on Fedora 23, but they get upgraded a lot, what with Fedora doing releases every six months or so.) The server is running Scientific Linux 7 and ZFS on Linux.

Best Answer

There are patches for libacl to do some kind of mapping between nfs4 and Posix ACLs. They seem to be unmaintained. I've never tried it.

http://www.citi.umich.edu/projects/nfsv4/linux/acl-patches/

http://www.citi.umich.edu/projects/nfsv4/linux/using-acls.html

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-nfsv4-acl-mapping-05

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