DESCRIPTION

This program is part of the DACS suite.

The dacsvfs utility is an interface to the DACS virtual filestore. It provides a way to examine, change, and delete items independently of how and where they are stored. See dacs.vfs(5) and the VFS directive for additional information.

To perform a virtual filestore operation, either an item_type or a URI argument must be provided to identify the filestore. The former is used to find the applicable VFS directive that has been configured for the specified jurisdiction (see dacs.conf(5)).

As a special case, the word enabled can be specified; a list of enabled store names is printed to stdout and the program terminates:

% dacsvfs -q -uj SomeJurisdiction enabled

This program is also available as a DACS web service, dacs_vfs(8).

OPTIONS

If present, the op argument specifies the operation to be performed on the filestore. If it is omitted, the program enters interactive mode where most of the same operations are available (type "help" for assistance). The following operations are available:

EXAMPLES

To store the DTDs used by DACS in a database rather than in a collection of files, you must configure an appropriate VFS directive and copy the files from the DACS distribution into the database. Because it is read-only, this database can be shared by all federations and jurisdictions on the host.

The first step is to select the type of database to use and decide where to put it. This example will use a Berkeley DB database (DACS must have been built with support for whichever database is used) and put it in /usr/local/dacs/federations/dtds.db. The URI to express this in the VFS syntax looks like this:

[dtds]dacs-db:/usr/local/dacs/federations/dtds.db

The next step is to create the database and load it with the DTDs. A simple shell script makes this easy to do. From the dtd-xsd directory of the DACS distribution, and replacing example.com with the URI of a DACS jurisdiction on your host, execute:

#! /bin/sh

for i in *.dtd
do
  dacsvfs -u example.com -q \
      '[dtds]dacs-db:/usr/local/dacs/federations/dtds.db' put $i < $i
done

To configure DACS to use the database, a VFS directive must be put in an appropriate place in dacs.conf so that it overrides the current configuration:

VFS "[dtds]dacs-db:/usr/local/dacs/federations/dtds.db"

To list the contents of the database you can do:

% dacsvfs -u example.com -q \
    '[dtds]dacs-db:/usr/local/dacs/federations/dtds.db' list

or since the VFS directive has been configured, simply:

% dacsvfs -u example.com -q dtds list

If you omit the -q flag, various debugging output will appear, including some feedback that your new database is actually being used by DACS.

Other resources used by DACS would be configured similarly. The load and dump operations can be particularly useful for this. If the file /tmp/roles associates roles with identities (e.g., as used by dacscheck(1)) as follows:

bobo:users
auggie:admin,users
harley:guest

then the following command initializes or updates a database from that file:

% dacsvfs -u example.com -q -F ":" \
    '[myroles]dacs-db:/usr/local/myapp/roles.db' < /tmp/roles

The URI [myroles]dacs-db:/usr/local/myapp/roles.db can then be used with dacscheck.

DIAGNOSTICS

The program exits 0 if everything was fine, 1 if an error occurred.

BUGS

There should be a caching mechanism that could be used with expensive storage types (i.e., those that are relatively slow to access, such as the http scheme).

SEE ALSO

dacs_vfs(8), dacs.conf(5)

AUTHOR

Distributed Systems Software (www.dss.ca)

COPYING

Copyright © 2003-2018 Distributed Systems Software. See the LICENSE file that accompanies the distribution for licensing information.