[ros-dev] Idea for NTFS replacement

[Andrew "Silver Blade" Greenwood]

Just to chime in here... Something I've thought about recently regarding 
file systems...

I believe there was going to be an ext2 driver in ReactOS. Am I right in 
thinking that complications arise because of the different ways in which 
security is implemented for different operating systems? And thus if you 
use ext2 from Windows or NTFS from Linux, you essentially have 
unrestricted access to all files (non-encrypted, of course.)

One possible solution might be to provide some sort of GROUPS and PASSWD 
"emulation" in ReactOS for each user account, so when NTFS is being 
used, the NT style security descriptors are used, whereas when ext2 is 
used, the Linux style is used. I'm assuming here of course that Linux 
uses the group and user IDs for the security info - I could be wrong. 
Still fairly new to Linux.

The actual emulation implementation wouldn't be too difficult as it'd 
just be a case of storing the Linux GID and UID for a user - something 
which should be possible. Maybe the ext2 driver would be responsible for 
converting the NT security descriptor into a Linux one? Or maybe a 
common module (linuxids.dll or something?) could perform this conversion.

I'm probably dreaming away here as if it was THAT easy, surely it would 
have been done already huh?


Robert Köpferl wrote:

> I think there are already enough file systems around. And as one looks
> some of them provide also very advanced features. I have an eye on an
> JFS implementation for NT - it's just the usual that I dont find either
> time or a starting point.
> The security in NT comes from the object manager and the processes'
> security tokens which are created by the security authority (which is
> replacible, see Novel). Thus any FS which allws additional meta info is
> suitable for us.
> It's a bad idea to reinvent an own NTFS (and even name it so). Confusion
> would be great.
>
> Mike Swanson wrote:
>
>> NTFS is an important feature of Windows NT, it is one of the most
>> advanced file systems devised. It contains many security devices that
>> makes Windows NT secure. It is much more reliable than FAT.
>>
>> Perhaps instead of waiting for someone to make complete NTFS support
>> in ReactOS (not that it shouldn't be done), we may make a filesystem
>> of our own that is designed with NTFS features in mind
>> (http://linux-ntfs.sf.net/ntfs/), but since we make it we have
>> complete support for it. I was thinking of the name MUSCLE, a pun of
>> FAT. I'm not exactly sure if the letter mean anything yet, but they
>> could be in the future ;)
>
>
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