[Gluster-users] variant symlinks

Computerisms Corporation
Wed, 18 Jul 2018 07:17:00 -0000

Hi Gluster Gurus,

I was casting about today for a way to make a symlink that resolves to
different files based on the username of the process owner.  The
idea/goal is to serve a webapp to multiple apache virtualhosts using
mpm-itk from a single aliased read-only directory, but have the config
file be a symlink that would resolve to a different file based on the
itk user accessing it.

I found that the feature is called a variant symlink, and apparently
this is a feature that Dragonfly BSD has supported for some time.  My
investigation also revealed there is a software called varsymfs
(https://github.com/onslauth/varsymfs) but I didn't have any luck
compiling it.  And I am not sure if that would work on a glusterfs any way.

I also found that this should be something that can be handled by FUSE,
but I didn't find any examples of how I might implement it.

It then occurred to me that maybe glusterfs has a similar feature
already built in, but I can find no evidence that it does.  But I
thought better to ask, maybe there is a way to accomplish this, but
perhaps I am not searching for the right terminology...

I have other solutions to the quest, such as hardlinking all the files
into different directories, but none seem as elegant as the variant
symlink idea.
--
Bob Miller
Cell: 867-334-7117
Office: 867-633-3760