ubuntu xp vmware cluster f...er...filesharing

[James Strandboge]

On Tue, 2006-10-10 at 10:10 -0400, Eric S. Johansson wrote:
> Felipe Alfaro Solana wrote:
> > 
> > I don't know what problems are you really experiencing, cause I have
> > used VMware shared folders and SAMBA in the past with no problems.
> > Maybe if you go into more detail, we can help.
> > 
> 
> okay, here it is in shorter form:
> 
> problem as I need to store all of my project files on XP because that's 
> where I back up from.  I need to make these project files accessible 
> from multiple virtual machines.  This means I need some form of file 
> sharing between XP and my virtual machines.  But this filesharing must 
> preserve user ID and permissions because the Python distribution 
> utilities use that information when installing modules.
> 
> 
> VMware shared folders do not preserve user ID and permissions of the 
> file.  They instead let anybody write and on read substitute 
> 700/root:root but still let anybody read.

The problem you are having is that the concept of file permissions in
Unix and Windows NT/XP is dramatically different.  Samba does a good job
of translating these permissions so that a Windows machine can store
files on a samba server and have the permissions be what the Windows
user expects.  Remember the simple case, Windows has 'read-only',
'archive', 'system' and 'hidden' bits for one user.  Unix has 'read',
'write', and 'execute' for owner, group and other (not accounting for
NT/XP acls or Unix acls and SUID, SGID and sticky bits).

However, if I understand correctly, you are going the other way and want
to store Unix files and its permissions on a Windows computer.  Windows
file sharing has no ability to do this translating because it assumes an
all Windows environment.  This might be ok for storing data files for a
particular user, but not for storing system files or files with
specialized permissions.  One option might be to have an NFS server
running on Windows XP (haven't done this personally, but presumably it
would try to preserve the file permissions somehow).  Another is to run
cron jobs on your Unix/Linux systems that store archive files (eg
tarballs) on your Windows server.  Possibly another is to adjust
VMware's file sharing settings (assuming you can adjust its masks and
force a particular user or group).

Jamie Strandboge 
-- 
Anemone Computing
http://www.anemonecomputing.com/