[tahoe-dev] Warning or error when running Tahoe as root

Two Spirit twospirit6905 at gmail.com
Fri Aug 3 06:05:27 UTC 2012


If I understand the question correctly, I was trying to make a file system
"mountable" by multiple hosts usable by all users while I was running the
setup as root on one of the servers -- not make a file system used by and
for the root user where root was the only user on the system. I wanted the
back end to be transparent to the end user (assumed I would have ability to
set standard unix file permissions) -- even have the user's home
directories within the Tahoe setup(Now I think that won't be possible).
 Before I got a better understanding of Tahoe,  I was thinking back then
that Tahoe was offering a user experience similar to something like
gmailfs, but in storage space managed by me instead of commercial Google. I
went and mounted my gmail space as diskspace using the standard mount and
posix type interface.

While still a newbie(meaning I haven't read all the docs yet or up to speed
yet), I get a feel that Tahoe is more of a user app for managing storage
space remotely using torrent/peer to peer technologies focusing on the
"Least Authority" portion. I personally don't like to call it a file
system, but more of a p2p storage management interface. Now learning it is
more userspace, I see that it is a good solution for utilizing the extra
diskspace on the corporate desktop workstations across routed networks as a
secure storage medium -- similar to the commercial version of Vembu's
Storgrid.  While I think tahoe has done a great job on ease of installation
and not trusting the remote colos, I'm thinking that tahoe has only solved
a portion of my needs, and looking at possible solution in combination with
possibly drbd(still debating which is going to perform better for my
different small to large configurations -- a network RAID1 between server
hosts at the block device level or a torrent like replication between hosts
at the file level) and or gfs2 (being evaluated now).

On Thu, Aug 2, 2012 at 8:13 PM, David-Sarah Hopwood <
david-sarah at jacaranda.org> wrote:

> On 02/08/12 19:39, markus reichelt wrote:
> > * David-Sarah Hopwood <david-sarah at jacaranda.org> wrote:
> >
> >> There's an argument for saying that this shouldn't just be a
> >> warning; it should be an error, because running as root once may
> >> already do things that need to be undone (e.g.  creating files
> >> owned by root, as in the case that motivated the ticket).
> >
> > Maybe I missed it but which install type was it all about? A
> > system-wide install or a mere user-install?
>
> The OP (Two Spirit) didn't say. But it shouldn't matter, since
> 'tahoe' should not run as or create files as root by default, whether
> or not it is a system install.
>
>
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