[plug] Samba group awarness

[Denis Brown]

At 12:21 25/03/2004 +0800, Ryan wrote:
>Howdy PLUG,
>
>Some of you may have caught on that I'm testing out Samba in my
>minuscule amounts of spare time at work with the view of replacing our
>NT file servers.  I plan to document what I discover eventually, however
>this generally hinges on the fact that I actually make some discoveries
>:)
Thanks, Ryan.

I am certainly interested in this topic and may be the person to whom you 
refer as doing the same thing :-)   I too have found intricacies with 
"groups" and have evolved some non-Samba ways of treating it.   A major 
consideration for me is the impact of legislation on my (human medical) 
data.   Standards Australia came out a couple of years ago with AS17799 
covering all sorts of aspects of data management - privacy, security, 
availability, etc, etc.   They subsequently released a smaller (89 pages?) 
document targeted at the health care industry.   In that they emphasise the 
need for encrypted data channels when sending information from A to B.

My solution to date is to offer my Windows users (the majority so far) 
FileZilla running SSH2 to move data backwards and forwards.   In fact, once 
the data is on the server, they'll do their analyses there.   Ordinary 
documents - not containing patient identifiable data - go to a separate 
Windows-based server run by others in the same Faculty.   In my spare time 
(har, de har, har) I will revisit the Samba solution because there are 
other things I can offer them down the track.

I mentioned "some non-Samba ways" plural... I'm going to get them to put 
their data in a PostgreSQL database eventually so that they can do things a 
bit more professionally than MS Access datasets, SPSS datasets, SAS 
datasets, and so on.   Will make life ton(ne)s easier than post-hoc trying 
to merge datasets from (a) different statistical programmes and (b) from 
different studies.   The pgsql data can then be dumped, encrypted and 
tarred for backup, all in one set rather than in bits and pieces.   Apart 
from everything else, PG can also offer them extra security of 
password-protected datasets.   Pipe dream but a good one :-)

Cheers and I too will share if I make discoveries :-)
Denis