Wow, that group +s seems exactly what I’m looking for! That actually looks like the clean solution I was looking for. I’ll test it out and report back, I’ll have to wait on Monday for the colleagues to be back in the server, but it seems very promising.

Thank you very much!

None of these programs allow overriding Linux permissions. You can not recline/rsync in another user directory. You can not sftp/scp in another user directory. My problem is not about transferring data across different systems, but rather accessing data on one system through different users. All users should be able to read and modify the files.

I thought sticky bits were used to allow other users to edit files but not delete them. Do they also allow inheriting the parent directory permissions?

It’s just default Linux permissions. People who get access to the HPC through the same institution are placed in the same group. As you may know scientific collaboration is quite important. Indeed when collaborating we sign all the necessary paperwork, but that does not translate to the HPC administrators who are part of a separate institution. To request a separate group you have to contact the HPC institution, they will have to contact the institutions involved. Those institutions will have to check that NDAs are already in place. If the NDAs are in place they will have to check that the data to be shared is actually covered by the project. I will have to fill a bunch of paperwork. This will be sent to an external auditor to check that everything is correct, and then everything goes back in that chain.

I already waste way too much of my time on paperwork. Worst case scenario is a collaborator leaks some data which will be published publicly in a few months anyway. And those collaborators will have access to such data anyway, just through other less comfortable means.

We can not setup a common group, no way we get root privileges. A cron job would not work either: it is a cluster with many nodes, of which many login nodes. Cron jobs do not work on such systems.

A share_cp script would in fact be a good solution, I may try that and see if people pick it up.

This is a large computing cluster, there are no such mountpoints available and I’m definitely not allowed to go there and plug a few disks into the racks.

That is a possibility, but how would the setup look like? Only the owner can update the permissions. This would mean that all users need an inotify daemon on that folder for whenever they copy something in there. Not to mention, this is an HPC and we mostly live in login nodes; our sessions are limited to 8 hours which makes setting up such a daemon a bit tricky. Could probably set up somewhere else a cronjob to connect and start it, but it feels a bit cumbersome.

A cloud solution is indeed an option, however not a very palatable one. The main problem with a cloud solution would be pricing. From what I can see, you can get 1TB for about 10€/month. We’d need substantially more than that. The cost is feasible and not excessive, but frankly it’s a bit of a joke to have to use someone else’s server when we have our own.

You want to bypass system level access level restrictions with some form of control but not go through your company’s standard method of doing so because of bureaucracy?

Yes. Not a company but public research, which means asking for a group change may lead to several people in the capital discussing on whether that is appropriate or not. I’d like this to be a joke, but it is not. We’d surely get access eventually if we do that, but that would lead to the unfortunate side: if we work in that way every new person who has to get in has to wait all that paperwork.

What do you mean? Is there an application that allows easily sharing files on one Linux system? That would be nice!

If you mean going through an external server or peer to peer transfer, that is not too feasible. I do not have other storage places with tens of terabytes available, and transfering that much data through some P2P layer, while feasible, would probably be even less user friendly.

Default user entries are in there and do work, however when copying existing files those get masked with the existing group permissions. As such, the only solution I found is to have everyone set their umask to 002 as otherwise we would not get write access to files which are copied and not created in place.

Lots of paperwork involved around our HPC. Politica in the middle and plausibly would have to sign confidentiality agreement with everyone who shares anything in there, which would have to go through a review process which is generally takes about 6 months.