• 2007
  • June
  • 05
  • I want an auto-journalling overlay file-system (With a searching, sorting, querying journal interface...)

I want an auto-journalling overlay file-system (With a searching, sorting, querying journal interface...)
Written by on in Young Coders.


I think I'm to the point of wanting the overlay security mechanism and journal I've been describing on my own machine. That is, if we can implement everything it would allow me to work on my own machine (and I have rather demanding requirements from a computer) while still providing extensive protections and a number of very cool features that would make it more usable than the mere file-and-directory approach to organising projects.

On the less upbeat side, complete failure getting sugar-jhbuild to work this evening. Argh. Wanted to play with some ideas and wound up killing 5 hours screwing around with idiotic autoconf junk that can't recognise that a library with .12 is a higher number than a library with a .5 (at least, that seems to be the problem).

Why are we building 71 packages including Python 2.4 and GTK/Gnome fragments? Python 2.5 and Gnome are already installed on the platform. I'll have to find more time to mess around with getting the Fedora 7 image to recognise the network so I can trying building in there instead of the Gentoo image, but that will have to wait until another OLPC day can be found, tomorrow I need to concentrate on billable work.

Comments

  1. jesse

    jesse on 06/06/2007 6:34 a.m. #


    Funny you should mention the overlay FS again - I was talking about this with someone else the other day and it's such a fundamental thing to want this style of layering for security and stability in a lot of areas.<br />
    <br />
    Features like snap-shots, rollbacks, ACLs, etc would be great to have in a day to day filesystem. Add in built in tripwire-like support and you're cooking with gas.<br />
    <br />
    I'm wondering if it would be possible to use FUSE to implement something along these lines.

  2. Mike Fletcher

    Mike Fletcher on 06/06/2007 7:37 a.m. #


    Should be possible to use FUSE, though I'd rather keep to aufs for the basic overlay system (since it's already out there and working).<br />
    <br />
    The tripwire stuff should be pretty much orthogonal, just run it on the system outside the overlay engine (which is itself somewhat dangerous, of course). ACLs aren't actually part of the proposal, it's looking at a one-person desktop/laptop solution for the most part. It wouldn't preclude them, but the assumption I've been making is that most sharing would go through the journals for the laptops. <br />
    <br />
    Might be interesting to extend the proposal formally to include multi-user box optimisations. If I'm sharing with a user on this box, the machine-level backup system could know that they are often local and give them the sharing certificate notice in their log.

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