UID mapping filesystem

[Tiago Espinha]

Dear all,

I'm a postgraduate student at the University of Leicester and the time has come for me to do my thesis. This thesis can be in the format of a technical project and one of the topics that has been proposed for my course has to do with Linux.

More concretely, the idea is that the student develops a FUSE file system that maps that user's user ID across several terminals. The purpose of this would be that if I have a USB stick formatted with ext4 and I copy files to it at my Linux terminal at home, I would be able to access these files from my terminal at work.

As it is, according to this project's description (I'm no guru on this matter), when we attempt to do what I've described, we won't have permissions (unless the files are chmod'ed to 777) to read the files, set aside modify them. Of course that as long as you are a super-user, you can always chown them to your user in the local terminal and all is well. However, you would have the same exact problem when returning to your other terminal.

My question is: does the community agree that this would be feasible with a FUSE file system AND that is this an actual feature with appeal and usefulness to the community? Has this been requested a lot or not really?

I have to make up my mind between this project and another one by tomorrow so if anyone has an opinion or take on this, I'm all ears!

Thanks in advance,
Tiago