Looks like Windows, smells like Windows, but it’s Solaris

Through Nico Williams a real interoperability story:

Alan Wright reports that the Solaris team recently completed the Solaris kernel CIFS service. That’s right: CIFS (i.e. Windows networking) is now on par with NFS and other kernel-level system services. To be able to achieve this goal, the Solaris folks had to create some really innovative pieces of technology:

  • To allow Windows style SIDs in the process credentials, they are now allowing negative and ephemeral UIDs and GIDs.
  • ZFS now supports all kinds of DOS attributes and full NTFS ACLs, i.e. ordered ACEs with SIDs.

All persistent data (like filesystem records) are dealing with actual SIDs, while non-persistent kernel and memory objects are using the ephemeral negative UIDs. The later are not stable across a reboot, but an ID mapping daemon performs the necessary translation between the SID and its UID.

With this new technology on the horizon, my new home project on a Solaris storage appliance for the basement (“Codename Filer”) looks brighter than ever …

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