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I have recently transitioned a Linux fileserver from offering only NFS v3 to also offering NFS v4. All of our clients happily started using NFS v4 automatically. Unfortunately, this effectively broke ACL management for the handful of users that use them, since the POSIX tools they're used to no longer work. (Worse, ls no longer indicates files that have ACLs, so they're more hidden than they used to be.)

I'm getting pushback from the users who don't want to learn new tools just because our storage system changed software (plus the fileserver is actually storing the ACLs on disk as POSIX ACLs, so the transition to NFSv4 ACLs feels a little silly, what with every system involved running some variant of Linux).

I can just force the clients to use NFS v3 for the users who don't want to learn NFSv4 ACLs, but is there a way to run NFS v4 clients but have the POSIX ACL programs work? Preferably without straying too far from the distribution's standard repositories.

The clients are running Fedora. (Currently they're on Fedora 23, but they get upgraded a lot, what with Fedora doing releases every six months or so.) The server is running Scientific Linux 7 and ZFS on Linux.

asciiphil
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There are patches for libacl to do some kind of mapping between nfs4 and Posix ACLs. They seem to be unmaintained. I've never tried it.

http://www.citi.umich.edu/projects/nfsv4/linux/acl-patches/

http://www.citi.umich.edu/projects/nfsv4/linux/using-acls.html

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-nfsv4-acl-mapping-05

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rudimeier
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  • Ooof. That's a good answer, but 2007 is *ancient* and I'd have to maintain my own fork of libacl. If that's my only option, the recalcitrant users get to live with NFS v3 mounts. :) – asciiphil Sep 14 '16 at 14:13
  • Maybe there were/are distros using these patches? You could recommend these ones to your users ;) Or experienced users may try these patches on their own local libacl + coreutils build and give you feedback :) – rudimeier Sep 14 '16 at 14:24