samba - Aug 2004 - suggestions about file ownership in multi-user "sandbox"

Hello all,

We have a directory containing some number (hundreds) of files that are 
used as a "sandbox" for development.  These files then get deployed by
our application server (they are mostly JSPs with a few other text or 
html files sprinkled in).  Once people are satisfied with the files, 
they are then deployed to the production servers via a batch process. 
As a first step in doing some change tracking, I have rigged up this 
batch process to automatically submit changed files to a Subversion 
repository.

This directory is shared from the Linux server where Samba is running. 
All of the people who do this development use Windows and expect to be 
able to read and write in this directory.  Since logistics and licensing 
dictate that there be only one test application server, the implicit 
assumption here is that individual working copies are not the best 
option.  These users additionally have little experience with subversion 
or any other VC system.

Given the script that I mentioned above, I can automatically track most 
of what we care about (changes, changelogs, etc.), but the one piece of 
information I can't capture automatically is the identity of the user 
who last changed the file.  We have a unified unix-NT user mapping, via 
LDAP, which works swimmingly, but it can't account for the fundamental 
problem, which is that a file, when edited in place, keeps its original 
owner UID.

Obviously this is a feature of filesystem semantics, so my question is 
this: does samba provide a hook or feature, similar to the 
preexec/postexec script, except for a file write?  I am willing to deal 
with performance implications, of course.  An alternative would be an 
unlink-and-create-before-write approach when updating a file, though 
that would require samba to do some gymnastics.  I'm not aware of any 
such feature.

If nothing can be done, I suppose I will have to suggest that we move to 
per-user working copies, but if anyone has any other suggestions I'd 
love to hear them.

Thanks in advance,

Matt Mitchell

On Wed, Aug 18, 2004 at 01:23:15PM -0500, Matt Mitchell wrote:
> Obviously this is a feature of filesystem semantics, so my question is 
> this: does samba provide a hook or feature, similar to the 
> preexec/postexec script, except for a file write?  I am willing to deal 
> with performance implications, of course.  An alternative would be an 
> unlink-and-create-before-write approach when updating a file, though 
> that would require samba to do some gymnastics.  I'm not aware of any 
> such feature.
Yes, you can write a Samba vfs module that only hooks write and does
what you want.

Jeremy.