Re: [9fans] group ownership for shared devices

[Russ Cox <rsc@swtch.com>]

On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 9:44 PM, Lyndon Nerenberg <lyndon@orthanc.ca> wrote:
> I have a CPU server running as 'glenda' that has a DVD drive. I want to make
> that DVD drive available to various terminals on the network. But I don't
> want to put the terminal users into glenda's group. The obvious
> solution seemed to be to set up a 'commondevs' group, add glenda and the
> allowed device users to it, then have the CPU server 'chgrp commondevs
> /dev/...' but no joy there. There's got to be something stunningly simple
> here that I'm missing ...

This solution didn't work because groups are specific to the
file server implementing them.  Your CPU server doesn't know
about the groups on your file servers and doesn't itself
implement any groups.

You could hack up a copy of srvfs that looks at the user
name being presented over the 9P connection and makes
the decision that way, or you could write a custom file server
with its own group list, like consolefs has.

Russ