Managing multiple parameters like high availability, physical disk damage or data losses by a single person is a tedious task. It also complicates server maintenance.
This is where Cloud Service Providers enter the picture. With cloud storage, the enterprise customer does not need to worry about maintaining high availability clusters, physical disks with redundancy levels, backup, data security and so on.
The Cloud service provider makes disk space available required for the enterprise customer. This lets the customer concentrate on his field of work and lets the cloud storage provider worry about all the gritty details of storage maintenance. This is where the use of disk-less systems help.
Disk-less Systems and NFS Home Directory
In the last two decades, there is an increased use of disk-less systems in all fields of Information Technology.
The reasons for using these systems are many. Following are few of them:
- Need for increased I/O performance
- Increased storage space requirements
- High availability requirements
Sustaining and restricting file/directory permissions becomes tricky when you are using a shared file-system for storing data of multi-user systems. Fortunately, NFS is at your rescue.
NFS supports native UNIX/Linux style file and directory permissions effectively since it is a native UNIX/Linux protocol as opposed to other protocols such as Samba.
NFS is perfect for creating NAS (Networked Attached Storage) in a Linux/UNIX environment.
There is something tricky when you use NFS as shared directory among different users. As the filesystem is shared across users, there is a chance that one user’s files and directories can be deleted by other users either intentionally or unintentionally.This is the most important issue that you have to address when using NFS share as the Home Directory.
CloudByte ElastiStor gives a quality solution for this scenario. ElastiStor supports restriction of deletion and renaming of files and directories belonging to one user by other users in a common shared NFS directory.
ElastiStor supports NFS for production level shared infrastructure for scenarios like in the case of home directory.
ElastiStor provides easy to manage interface for creating an NFS share with the restriction of not allowing deletions and renames of files/directories of one user by others.
ElastiStor provides a nice User Interface where the Administrator can create an NFS share, and select whether all users who mount the directory should be treated as root or should the share be used as a home directory which effectively imposes file and directory permissions.
If the home directory feature is enabled on an NFS share (in ElastiCenter), files or directories created by one user cannot be deleted by other users of the same share although they can see the file data as READ only.
If the owner of the file wants to give WRITE permissions to another user, he can do so by changing the permissions of the file like he does for normal Linux/UNIX file system’s file.
The owner cannot give delete/rename permissions on his files to other users.
The Yes/No options in ElastiCenter for Map Users to root let you do the following:
- If you select Yes, all users get root privileges.
- If you select NO, then the NFS Home Directory feature is enabled on the NFS share automatically.
- If you select Yes for only some client entries or if you have selected Yes for all clients, then the NFS share will not have NFS Home Directory feature enabled.
In Home Directory scenario, the client’s root is treated as the root user and is given full privileges on the NFS share.
In short, root can delete/modify/rename any file whether it is created by root or any other user in the same way as standard Linux/UNIX on the NFS share.
