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Warning

This article is generally good, but a better model has come out of I need to pull and merge from what was learned in the WordPress instructions currently being finalized. Once this is done, will extract the ACLs from there and merge here for a final article..

Basically I have given up on ACLs as they do not behave the way I would like and the creators think that is ok. Instead, I am looking at application level virtualization to define control.

 

What are ACLs?

Advanced permissions beyond the traditional Unix permissions. It has powerful features such as being able to give permissions to more than one user and more than one group.

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Limitations

umask - ACLs are only applied generally only during create. More specifically, create(), mkdir(), mknod(), mkfifo(), or open(). Other operations will be limited by what the umask of the user performing the operation such as copy or move. (I need to go into more detail here but this is very very limiting and intuitively not the behaviour most people expect). In other words, you apply an ACL to a directory and subdirectory expecting files copied in would inherit those ACLs, well they don't because of the default umask.

Copying Files - This is no-longer an issue with modern (2012 is when I checked) versions of Ubuntu and I would guess other *nix systems. If you want to preserve specific ACL permissions and not inherit, use -p. With an older system, check that when setting default ACLs on a directory, the following commands will inherit permissions properly:  local copy, sftp remote create and sftp remote copy.

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