Fedora 11: moving to posix file capabilities?

[Les Mikesell]

Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Les Mikesell wrote:
>> Steve Grubb wrote:
>>> On Wednesday 29 October 2008 16:53:30 Chris Adams wrote:
>>>>> Its not a ping issue, its an installation issue. :)   I can either 
>>>>> chmod
>>>>> 4755 or capset cap_net_raw=ep  during the installation. Upstream is 
>>>>> not
>>>>> involved in this.
>>>> How do these new bits get backed up?  I'm still working on getting
>>>> SELinux backed up correctly, and now this... <sigh> an admin's job is
>>>> never done.
>>>
>>> Since they are stored as xattrs, tar and star should do it if you 
>>> tell them to get the extended attributes. Also, aide supports looking 
>>> for changes in xattrs if you need that, too.
>>>
>>
>> What about cp -a and rsync -a?  I expect either of these to give me a 
>> working system.
> 
> Read the man page. You need to pass -X or -xattrs to preserve extended 
> attributes.

Yes, but it is more complicated in the rsync case in the face of 
changing APIs and attributes.  The remote side is unlikely to match 
exactly or I wouldn't be doing this copy, and it might even involve 
temporary snapshots parked on a 3rd (also different) system as a backup 
or master copy. Does -xattr always mean exactly the same set of extended 
attributes on every system, or will I need a matrix of what version of 
what OS running what version of what filesystem to be sure I have 
matching semantics?

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com