Red Hat Enterprise 3 Beta Reviewed

viewstyle writes "eWEEK has got a review of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 Beta, code named Taroon. It now has the new Red Hat Bluecurve interface. New important stuff includes: logical volume management and access control lists in the file system. The access control list feature is something that has been in Windows and Solaris for some time. If you're interested, you can download it here."

Comments

Feature list

[cly]

That's not a review. That's just a list of features copied from the README file or something.

And notice that out of 10 paragraphs, 6 start with Taroon?

Re:Access Control Lists suck

[crmartin]

Never actually worked in an environment with confidentiality requirements, have you, bubba?

Let's assume that you want to eliminate ACLs but still need to implement fine-grained access control (like, you want to give Ann access to payroll records, but not to bank records, while giving Barry access to the bank records but keeping him out of the payroll.) You can do it in Linux without using ACLs: you simply set up a bunch of groups for things like 'payroll' and put Ann in payroll, but not Barry, etc. If you want to make it finer-grained, you could give Ann access to payroll for hourly and Amy could have access to payroll for exempt -- you now need groups 'payroll-hourly' and 'payroll-exempt'.

Pretty quick, you have something like

file group user

pay-hr.xls payroll-hourly Ann
pay-ex.xls payroll-exempt Amy
bank.xls banking Barry
...

in which every file has with it a group, and each group has the name of the user permitted access. In fact, since it's usually a few people, not just one, who has access, you will end up with a list of people who have controlled access.

And all without access control lists. Except for the lists of people who are allowed access.

What an advantage!