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How to transfer files over network preserving the xattrs?

Title.

The situation is basically this:

  • NFS works, it’s very fast, keeps the xattrs but if used without Kerberos it’s not secure. If used with Kerberos it works, but has a ticket that expires and forces me to reenter the credentials frequently in order to use it. If there was a way to use NFS with Kerberos and save the credentials NFS would be the perfect solution.
  • Samba works fine too, also keeps the xattrs but I had some troubles with filenames (mainly with some special characters, emoji, etc). Besides, as both my server and my clients run Linux I prefer to avoid it if I have the choice.
  • sshfs would be the natural choice, not as fast as NFS but it’s pretty secure, I already use it in most of my network shares but I just can’t find a way to make it preserve the files xattrs.

Do you guys have any suggestions or maybe any other options that I might use?

PseudoSpock ,
@PseudoSpock@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

linux-audit.com/using-xattrs-extended-attributes-…

CtrlAltOoops OP ,

I appreciate your help, but notice that the article just tell some basics of xattrs usage (I already know how to use it), but has no reference of file transfering files, which is what I need.

IsoKiero ,

I assume you don’t intend to copy the files but use them from a remote host? As security is a concern I suppose we’re talking about traffic over the public network where (if I’m not mistaken) kerberos with NFS doesn’t provide encryption, only authentication. You obviously can tunnel NFS with SSH or VPN and I’m pretty sure you can create a kerberos ticket which stores credentials locally for longer periods of time and/or read them from a file.

SSH/VPN obviously causes some overhead, but they also provide encryption over the public network. If this is something ran in a LAN I wouldn’t worry too much about encrypting the traffic and in my own network I wouldn’t worry about authentication either too much. Maybe separate the NFS server to it’s own VLAN or firewall it heavily.

atzanteol ,

“rsync -X”

myersguy ,

You didn’t mention rsync, which I think is usually considered standard. I’d look into that.

bjoern_tantau ,
@bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de avatar

Rsync with the -a option is meant to preserve as much as possible.

CtrlAltOoops OP ,

Thanks for the suggestion. In fact I tried rsync and it works. But is it possible to integrate in my current workflow? Maybe copying/moving files using a file manager?

I’m asking because with the 3 options I mentioned I may, for example, create mount points in fstab and from this there on everything would be transparent to the user. Would it be possible using rsync?

mumblerfish ,

How much delay could you live with between syncs? If it’s not important to be immidiate, just an end-of-the-day thing you could cronjob the rync with the update flag every so often.

solidgrue ,
@solidgrue@lemmy.world avatar

Secure file transfers frequently trade off some performance for their crypto. You can’t have it both ways. (Well, you can but you’d need hardware crypto offload or end to end MACSEC, where both are more exotic use cases)

rsync is basically a copy command with a lot of knobs and stream optimization. It also happens to be able to invoke SSH to pipeline encrypted data over the network at the cost of using ssh for encrypting the stream.

Your other two options are faster because of write-behind caching in to protocol and transfer in the clear-- you don’t bog down the stream with crypto overhead, but you’re also exposing your payload

File managers are probably the slowest of your options because they’re a feature of the DE, and there are more layers of calls between your client and the data stream. Plus, it’s probably leveraging one of NFS, Samba or SSHFS anyway.

I believe “rsync -e ssh” is going to be your best over all case for secure, fast, and xattrs. SCP might be a close second. SSHFS is a userland application, and might suffer some penalties for it

CtrlAltOoops OP ,

I’ll take a closer look into rsync possibilities and see if it applies to my situation. I appreciate your input.

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