Due to the unsatisfactory licensing changes with VMWare, we've switched to using Virtualbox to provision guest operating systems in our computer labs. (VMWare used to license a version in perpetuity, but now licenses expire after a year, which guarantees we'll have to rebuild all our stuff every year no-matter-what. That's a deal-breaker for us.) Virtualbox is entirely satisfactory for our needs.
We do want to have guest operating systems shared across all users, however. With VMWare, we jumped through some hoops to build a fresh copy of the GuestOS for each user as needed, but we hoped to avoid that this time around and share the images across users. We found, however, that when a user launched the image, it re-created all the files owned by the user and readable/writable by no-one else. Suboptimal for our porpoises.
After a bit of research, I found this article that explained how to set ACLs in MacOSX to override the unix permissions. That seemed to work great, and I imagined that I could just capture the changes using radmind. I blithely made a transcript and, upon inspection, realized that it hadn't captured anything. I did a few searches and found this, which suggests that ACLs can't be managed with radmind. Sigh.
In the end, I tweaked the perl script we're using to run radmind. After it completes the update and before it restarts, it applies the ACLs to the Virtual Machines directory. Problem solved.
- Steven D. Brewer's blog
- Log in to post comments