I work on an HPC and often I have to share files with other users. The most approachable solution is to have an external cloud storage and recline back and forth. However there’s some projects that are quite heavy (several TB) and that is unfeasible. We do not have a shared group. The following is the only solution I found which is not to just set al permissions to 777, and I still don’t like it.

Create a directory and set ACL to give access to the selected users. This works fine if the users create new files in there, but it does not work if they copy from somewhere else as default umask is 022. Thus the only appropriate solution is to change default umask to 002, which however affects file creation system wide. The alternative is to change permissions every time you copy something, but you all know very well that is not going to happen.

Does it really have to be such a pain in the ass?

  • ranzispa@mander.xyzOP
    1·
    3 days ago

    This is a large computing cluster, there are no such mountpoints available and I’m definitely not allowed to go there and plug a few disks into the racks.

      • ranzispa@mander.xyzOP
        2·
        3 days ago

        None of these programs allow overriding Linux permissions. You can not recline/rsync in another user directory. You can not sftp/scp in another user directory. My problem is not about transferring data across different systems, but rather accessing data on one system through different users. All users should be able to read and modify the files.

          • ranzispa@mander.xyzOP
            2·
            2 days ago

            I don’t want to override user permissions, I want it to be easy that users can agree to a directory being shared and in such directory group permissions get overridden by some laxer restrictions through explicit authorization of the user. I’d like for this to exist. This would not make permissions useless, just allow for an easy way to share files across users on a filesystem.