Don't worry, we've all been there :-). But if you're recreating a filesystem, a better solution may be to use the existing one. As I understand your post, you will now be limiting access to the files to be only via the webserver, right? So you don't have to worry about access at the filesystem level, you just need to make it simple enough for your web server to only ever serve the correct files to the client (this does break down if someone manages to compromise your webserver, but that's a hard problem to solve).

So when a user logs in, get the access data for that user from the database and create a new directory in the webtree containing sym- or hard links to the files that he has access rights to. Have the server only serve files for that user from this directory and delete it after the user logs out. This solution may not be so good if you've got umpteen-thousand files you're serving to each user, but otherwise it seems like the simplest and most efficient solution to your requirements.


There are ten types of people: those that understand binary and those that don't.

In reply to Re^3: can a perl script act as a daemon to serve data in its symbol table? by tirwhan
in thread can a perl script act as a daemon to serve data in its symbol table? by leocharre

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.