Hi
I have two classes of users to which I wish to give easy access to files
on my servers:
1. shell users
I trust them, and they should have full access to the file system (barring
permissions, of course)
2. Mail users
I wish to allow somne of them to build personal homepages on the web
server (which is currently the same as the mail server). I wish to limit
them to a certain subdirectory which is not their home directory
What I want to figure out now is how the users will access it.
One immediate answer is FTP: it is a mature protocol, with many good
clients on many platforms. It has good support for manipulating unix file
permissions, etc.
However, FTP has some security issues, anmely the authentication is in
plain text and easy to aniff.
What alternatives do I have for either groups?
shell users:
""""""""""""
scp comes to mind. However, I am not aware of any good graphical client
(it is good enough for me, but not for others). I tried Iexlorer that is
linked from the site of PuTTY, and it didn't look very good.
Is there any good graphical scp/sftp/whatever client for that runs on
windows?
Is there any component that will act as a ftp proxy and will connect to a
server using sftp? (maybe there is, maybe there isn't, and maybe it is too
technically difficult)
What other recommendations do you have?
mail users:
"""""""""""
I saw a couple of web inerfaces for manipulating files. I have examined a
number of them, and didn't like any of them. Some problems they share:
1. web interface stinks
2. security: virtually all of them don't use that underlying permissions,
and require a directory writable by the user of apache.
WebDAV:
I've heard about this. Saw the site. I have no idea how much of that is
hype. Is it implemented widely enough (read: any people here chose to work
with it and still think that they have made the right choice)?
Front-Page server extensions:
Are they supported by any non-MS client/server ?
Samba:
The system runs in a local network, so samba is an alternative. I have yet
to configure it properly. One specific thing: I understand that samba does
not interact well with unix permissions. Those directories may need a
special combination of group/user/permissions and I'm not exactly sure how
to do it through samba.
Any other alternatives?
--
Tzafrir Cohen
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir
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