CephFS Client Capabilities¶

Use Ceph authentication capabilities to restrict your file system clients to the lowest possible level of authority needed.

Note

Path restriction and layout modification restriction are new features in the Jewel release of Ceph.

Note

Using Erasure Coded(EC) pools with CephFS is supported only with the BlueStore Backend. They cannot be used as metadata pools and overwrites must be enabled on the data pools.

Path restriction¶

By default, clients are not restricted in what paths they are allowed to mount. Further, when clients mount a subdirectory, e.g., /home/user, the MDS does not by default verify that subsequent operations are ‘locked’ within that directory.

To restrict clients to only mount and work within a certain directory, use path-based MDS authentication capabilities.

Syntax¶

To grant rw access to the specified directory only, we mention the specified directory while creating key for a client using the following syntax.

ceph fs authorize *file_system_name* client.*client_name* /*specified_directory* rw

For example, to restrict client foo to writing only in the bar directory of file system cephfs, use

ceph fs authorize cephfs client.foo / r /bar rw

results in:

client.foo
  key: *key*
  caps: [mds] allow r, allow rw path=/bar
  caps: [mon] allow r
  caps: [osd] allow rw tag cephfs data=cephfs_a

To completely restrict the client to the bar directory, omit the root directory

ceph fs authorize cephfs client.foo /bar rw

Note that if a client’s read access is restricted to a path, they will only be able to mount the file system when specifying a readable path in the mount command (see below).

Supplying all or * as the file system name will grant access to every file system. Note that it is usually necessary to quote * to protect it from the shell.

See User Management - Add a User to a Keyring. for additional details on user management

To restrict a client to the specified sub-directory only, we mention the specified directory while mounting using the following syntax.

./ceph-fuse -n client.*client_name* *mount_path* -r *directory_to_be_mounted*

For example, to restrict client foo to mnt/bar directory, we will use.

./ceph-fuse -n client.foo mnt -r /bar

Free space reporting¶

By default, when a client is mounting a sub-directory, the used space (df) will be calculated from the quota on that sub-directory, rather than reporting the overall amount of space used on the cluster.

If you would like the client to report the overall usage of the file system, and not just the quota usage on the sub-directory mounted, then set the following config option on the client:

client quota df = false

If quotas are not enabled, or no quota is set on the sub-directory mounted, then the overall usage of the file system will be reported irrespective of the value of this setting.

Layout and Quota restriction (the ‘p’ flag)¶

To set layouts or quotas, clients require the ‘p’ flag in addition to ‘rw’. This restricts all the attributes that are set by special extended attributes with a “ceph.” prefix, as well as restricting other means of setting these fields (such as openc operations with layouts).

For example, in the following snippet client.0 can modify layouts and quotas on the file system cephfs_a, but client.1 cannot.

client.0
    key: AQAz7EVWygILFRAAdIcuJ12opU/JKyfFmxhuaw==
    caps: [mds] allow rwp
    caps: [mon] allow r
    caps: [osd] allow rw tag cephfs data=cephfs_a

client.1
    key: AQAz7EVWygILFRAAdIcuJ12opU/JKyfFmxhuaw==
    caps: [mds] allow rw
    caps: [mon] allow r
    caps: [osd] allow rw tag cephfs data=cephfs_a

Snapshot restriction (the ‘s’ flag)¶

To create or delete snapshots, clients require the ‘s’ flag in addition to ‘rw’. Note that when capability string also contains the ‘p’ flag, the ‘s’ flag must appear after it (all flags except ‘rw’ must be specified in alphabetical order).

For example, in the following snippet client.0 can create or delete snapshots in the bar directory of file system cephfs_a.

client.0
    key: AQAz7EVWygILFRAAdIcuJ12opU/JKyfFmxhuaw==
    caps: [mds] allow rw, allow rws path=/bar
    caps: [mon] allow r
    caps: [osd] allow rw tag cephfs data=cephfs_a

Network restriction¶

client.foo
  key: *key*
  caps: [mds] allow r network 10.0.0.0/8, allow rw path=/bar network 10.0.0.0/8
  caps: [mon] allow r network 10.0.0.0/8
  caps: [osd] allow rw tag cephfs data=cephfs_a network 10.0.0.0/8

The optional {network/prefix} is a standard network name and prefix length in CIDR notation (e.g., 10.3.0.0/16). If present, the use of this capability is restricted to clients connecting from this network.