This post was mostly inspired by reading this post in trying to get my head around the ZFS ACL and permission system.

Basically I have a pool set out as follows:

tank
tank/media
tank/zones

tank/media is served via CIFS and NFS to multiple clients on my network, each with their own unix account on the OpenSolaris server. tank/zones is used for extra zones running on the host.

Everything was working great until I found that files and directories created by clients ended up looking like this:

----------  1 greg staff 734310400 2009-07-18 19:10 foo.txt
d---------  2 greg staff        19 2008-12-06 14:10 Bar

This sure didn’t go down well when other users needed to access those files or directories.

So in following the above mentioned post I did this:

# zfs set aclinherit=passthrough tank/media
# zfs set aclmode=passthrough tank/media
# /bin/chmod 0774 /tank/media
# /bin/chmod -R A- /tank/media
# /bin/chmod -R A=owner@:full_set:fd:allow /tank/media
# /bin/chmod -R A+group@:full_set:fd:allow /tank/media
# /bin/chmod -R A+everyone@:read_set:fd:allow /tank/media

A better description of what the flags / syntax mean can be found here and here

A simple breakdown:

• First off, we tell ZFS that all files or directories must inherit all acls / permissions from their parent.
• We use /bin/chmod as the chmod in the default path is the GNU chmod which does not understand ZFS acls.
• The second chmod “A-” will remove all acls currently set on the object.
• We then set the owners permission to the “full_set”, thus giving the owner all possible permissions.
• We do the same for the group.
• Finally, we give everyone else read access.