Alan McKinnon wrote:
> On 20/06/2013 12:32, Alessandro Selli wrote:
>> I'm just playing the devil's advocate here.
>> Most modern distributions use the ext4 driver to handle all ext*
>> filesystems. ext4 does support the most often used attributes, the LPIC
>> objective could only consider those.
>> I don't think we should worry about attributes' permanence between
>> filesystems or across archival tools, at least no more than we already
>> do about the vfat filesystem. Just assume the candidate is aware that
>> they could disappear under particular circumstances.
>> Worthiness of tools is a difficult matter to evaluate. Everything is
>> worthelss until you need it. Something is worthier than something else
>> even if you use it 1/100 the times. I do think the burden of
>> considering the append-only and immutable attributes to be pretty low,
>> and those attributes are supported by all the filesystems distributions
>> format installation storage by default.
>>
> So it's like lilo then (recently discussed here)?
I don't think so. LiLO is no longer the default boot loader of most
(all but one?) major distros, and it's code is in maintenance only mode
AFAIK. Instead, every major distribution that I could check (Debian,
Fedora and Ubuntu) all install chattr and lsattr by default.
[...]
> By all means mention in a
> class that they exist and which man pages to read when the student needs
> them,
Looks like 90% the same as what I proposed.
[...]
> But I don't know how to examine a knowledge area of "know that something
> exists" :-)
Aren't there already several plain awareness areas?
One could be asked:
*) What does the lsattr command accomplish?
1) It is the Linux System Accounting Tool for Terminal Resources
2) It is a tool for listing extended filesystem attributes
3) It is a popular alias for ls -atTr
4) It is a system stress-testing tool
5) It is an LPI candidate stress-testing tool
> I would *much* rather concentrate on things sysadmins *will*
> run into, such as why is it that to prevent a file being deleted the
> permission needed is applied to the containing directory and not the
> file itself?
This is an different matter. Of course you know this does not
accomplish the same thing as the chattr command does: a directory
permissions affects *all* files inside the directory. And using chattr
you have two different ways to protect a file: you can set it immutable
or just undeletable. And you cannot implement an append-only or a
secure deletion mode on files acting on directory permissions. All
these four modes are supported by ext4.
> Now that one goes right to the heart of how Unix works, and
> a very worthy exam question.
I thought LPI was about Linux, not UNIX. Should we drop iptables
because other UNIXes don't have it?
> [1] I've used attrs twice in my life, both times to immute valuable
> files, and both times I've undone it months later after hours of
> frustrating debugging. Nowadays I use RCS instead.
RCS is not installed by default by *any* distribution that I know of.
Plus, RCS is designed to other things compared to chattr. Filesystem
extended attributes add file properties beyond the traditional UNIX
ones, while RCS "manages multiple revisions of files". They are two
different tools designed for different purposes.
Do you really think RCS should be in LPIC-1 or -2?
Do more people use RCS than chattr?
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