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Add a task to the security policy

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Creating and adding a policy task to a security policy is the fourth step in configuring and applying ACLs to files or folders in SVMs. When you create the policy task, you associate the task with a security policy. You can add one or more task entries to a security policy.

About this task

The security policy is a container for a task. A task refers to a single operation that can be done by a security policy to files or folders with NTFS or mixed security (or to a volume object if configuring Storage-Level Access Guard).

There are two types of tasks:

  • File and directory tasks

    Used to specify tasks that apply security descriptors to specified files and folders. ACLs applied through file and directory tasks can be managed with SMB clients or the ONTAP CLI.

  • Storage-Level Access Guard tasks

    Used to specify tasks that apply Storage-Level Access Guard security descriptors to a specified volume. ACLs applied through Storage-Level Access Guard tasks can be managed only through the ONTAP CLI.

A task contains definitions for the security configuration of a file (or folder) or set of files (or folders). Every task in a policy is uniquely identified by the path. There can be only one task per path within a single policy. A policy cannot have duplicate task entries.

Guidelines for adding a task to a policy:

  • There can be a maximum of 10,000 tasks entries per policy.

  • A policy can contain one or more tasks.

    Even though a policy can contain more than one task, you cannot configure a policy to contain both file-directory and Storage-Level Access Guard tasks. A policy must contain either all Storage-Level Access Guard tasks or all file-directory tasks.

  • Storage-Level Access Guard is used to restrict permissions.

    It will never give extra access permissions.

You can customize the security descriptor configuration by using the following optional parameters:

  • Security type

  • Propagation mode

  • Index position

  • Access control type

The value for any optional parameter is ignored for Storage-Level Access Guard. See the man pages for more information.

Steps
  1. Add a task with an associated security descriptor to the security policy: vserver security file-directory policy task add -vserver vserver_name -policy-name policy_name -path path -ntfs-sd SD_nameoptional_parameters

    file-directory is the default value for the -access-control parameter. Specifying the access control type when configuring file and directory access tasks is optional.

    vserver security file-directory policy task add -vserver vs1 -policy-name policy1 -path /home/dir1 -security-type ntfs -ntfs-mode propagate -ntfs-sd sd2 -index-num 1 -access-control file-directory

  2. Verify the policy task configuration: vserver security file-directory policy task show -vserver vserver_name -policy-name policy_name -path path

    vserver security file-directory policy task show

    Vserver: vs1
    Policy: policy1
    
    Index    File/Folder    Access           Security   NTFS       NTFS Security
             Path           Control          Type       Mode       Descriptor Name
    -----    --------       -----------      --------   ------     ----------------
    1        /home/dir1     file-directory   ntfs       propagate  sd2