On 4/8/11 4:33 PM, Wade Preston Shearer wrote: > My plan thus far consists of creating a local SMB share for them to mount on > their desktops. They can then manage (drag-n-drop) files to and from this. A > cron job will rsync these files up to a web server every ten minutes. I've > done this before and it works well.
If they are all on the same private network, then I would suggest using smb. If they are spread across the net, then you will want to use webdav and have them authenticate to push documents up. All major platforms have webdav capabilities that all them to drap-n-drop. This would be very easy for the non-technical user. However, you will probably need to provide some information on how to setup the webdav drive. > The obstacle that I have run into this time however is that some of the > content will need to be protected. Certain assets can be accessed by anyone > that has the URL but others will need to require that the user be > authenticated. The way I usually restrict access to a file is by putting it > on the server outside of web root and then streaming it down to the browser > through a script. The script can verify that the user is authenticated. This > doesn't work though if the assets are on a separate server. > > The only thing I have thought of thus far is putting the assets outside of > web root on the other server and reading them via a web service that requires > authentication. The service would authenticate, read the file, and stream the > bytes over to the requesting server where it would then stream it out to the > browser (forced header download). For access, you might have to create your own setup via a web server or use some other option like amazon to share files. I am not sure what your requirements are for your acls, amount of bandwidth, total number of users to support or anything else like that; but, you should be able to handle that via the server and not have to create system level accounts. You could still leverage the webdav to also access the files as well with authentication. You would just need to set that up. I think you can even manage the users via a database as well. Making it easier to manage then file based users. If you provide some additional information on what your requirements are, I can provide great detail on possible solutions. thanks, -- thebigdog _______________________________________________ UPHPU mailing list [email protected] http://uphpu.org/mailman/listinfo/uphpu IRC: #uphpu on irc.freenode.net
