Code access security for .net applications

I just asked some people at Microsoft (Alex and Erwin) about security permissions for .net and their answer has led me onto the following posts which are finally giving me a better idea of how things work with the security policy.  It’s amazing how helpful they are to random strangers 😉

When I’d been looking up the problem before I’d only really seen it from the clients side, and come across references to caspol.exe.  As a developer you really want to start by looking at permcalc.exe and the things that you can do become a lot clearer.

Aaron Steele has written some very clear articles on the subject of trust.

• http://blogs.pointbridge.com/Blogs/floraday_burt/Pages/Post.aspx?_ID=2 
• http://blogs.pointbridge.com/Blogs/floraday_burt/Pages/Post.aspx?_ID=3 
• http://blogs.pointbridge.com/Blogs/floraday_burt/Pages/Post.aspx?_ID=4 

Then there’s this possibly useful note of a use of permcalc.exe.  

• http://weblogs.asp.net/hernandl/archive/2005/11/21/permcalcftissues.aspx 

I’m still looking at the best way to deploy a security policy.  From what I’m told it’s possible to deploy a custom security policy in an MSI file so that may be the way to ensure your application works from wherever it is deployed to; even network shares.  At least for the person who installed it anyway.

Here’s an additional note on a potential limitation of permcalc.exe.

• http://weblogs.asp.net/hernandl/archive/2005/11/21/permcalcftissues.aspx 

Creating a backup user for doing a mysqldump

Creating a user just for doing the backups via mysqldump is really simple.  In mysql just issue the following grant statement,

grant select, lock tables on mydatabase.* to 'backup'@'localhost' identified by 'password';