Note: this post has been migrated from our previous wiki documentation.
On 13th May 2018 the SRCF sysadmins will begin making some system changes to better comply with the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation.
Filesystem permissions and layout changes
- Users’ and societies’ home directories (/home/spqr2, /societies/foosoc) will have any public-access permissions revoked (chmod o-rx); only the owner will be able to read a directory in /home and only society administrators will be able to read a directory in /societies
- Users and societies will be given an additional public directory, named /public/home/spqr2 or /public/societies/foosoc; anything placed in there will be readable by anybody else unless the permissions are explicitly changed
- public_html and cgi-bin directories will be moved into /public (with a symbolic link from the old location)
- Nothing else will be moved into /public since we have no way of knowing what data should be public
(Of course, replace ‘spqr2’ or ‘foosoc’ with your relevant CRSid or society short-names respectively.)
As a result:
- Scripts in websites which use relative paths to access files outside of public_html will need adjusting
- Ad-hoc file-sharing arrangements which relied upon files or directories being world-readable may need adjusting, e.g. by moving the relevant directories into /public
Please be prepared to take some action next week to make sure that everything you use the SRCF for still works.