[NCLUG] Why one group per user and SGID home dirs

[Mike Loseke]

Thus spake Matt Taggart:
> 
> "S. Luke Jones" writes...
> 
> > Here's a question for you experienced Bof###system admins: how do you
> > structure directories to accomodate multi-user projects? Let's say that
> > users Alan, Bob, and Charlie are all part of the Foobar team. You make
> > a group "foobar" and add them all to it, yes? Then you need to find a
> > spot in the filesystem for them to share: do you coach "alan" about how
> > to make a navigable path (setting g+rx on directories, etc.) to some
> > directory he manages, or do you make a new directory somewhere else.
> > If the latter, where?
> 
> As I mentioned in a previous mail some projects are big enough to warrant the 
> BOFH creating a separate dir, some are small enough that a user should be 
> expected to set something up in a dir they already control. I think it's a 
> trade off between the amount of work for the BOFH and how clean and orderly 
> they want to keep the filesystem. I suspect you'll get different answers from 
> every admin as everyone has their own opinion about such things.

 Scale is also an issue. I have many projects that are continually filling
up my RAID's (one in particular encroaching on a terabyte) and the contents
of those project dirs get a little complex.

 Imagine you have a hard drive. Imagine that your hard drive has some
chips on it that make it do stuff. Imagine the amount of data generated
in the coding, compiling, testing, simulating, debugging, regression
testing, packaging and delivery (not to mention customer application
coding, testing and debugging) of the software and firmware that makes
those chips do stuff. Imagine that the group doing this is servicing 10
or more external customers for this software and fimrware and that they
are simultaneously working on all of these phases for different projects,
some of which need to be isolated due to contractural agreements.  Imagine
that this group is made up of people at geographically, and culturally,
diverse sites with different BOFH support folks.

 Using the simplest grouping policies for this group, and several others
like it, is both the easiest and most efficient way to facilitate the work
they need to do.

 I'm not saying it's the One True Way(tm), it's just the best way for our
environment, all things considered.


-- 
   Mike Loseke    | If at first you don't succeed,
 mike at verinet.com | increase the amperage.