I’ve got this strange behaviour in my HDP 2.2 preview sandbox :
[root@sandbox ~]# kinit guest
[root@sandbox ~]# hdfs dfs -ls -d /user/laurent
drwx------ - laurent readers 0 2015-06-18 13:47 /user/laurent
[root@sandbox ~]# hdfs dfs -touchz /user/laurent/guest02
[root@sandbox ~]# hdfs dfs -ls /user/laurent
-rw-r--r-- 1 guest readers 0 2015-06-18 13:47 /user/laurent/guest02
Ok. Weird, I can create a file in a directory theorically unreadable.
When suddenly:
[root@sandbox ~]# /etc/init.d/xapolicymgr stop
XAPolicyManager has been stopped.
[root@sandbox ~]# # restart HDFS service through Ambari as XA-Secure is a wrapper around HDFS processes
[root@sandbox ~]# hdfs dfs -touchz /user/laurent/guest03
touchz: Permission denied: user=guest, access=EXECUTE, inode="/user/laurent":laurent:readers:drwx------Let the party begin !
So if you’re running into that case, please check xasecure (or argus, or ranger) are not active and then bypassing HDFS rights, for example /etc/init.d/xapolicymgr stop and /etc/init.d/argus-usersync stop