[plug] Samba group awarness

[Ryan]

On Thu, 2004-03-25 at 14:16, Denis Brown wrote:

> 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.

Have you had a look at WebDrive?  The new version handles SFTP on 2K/XP
boxes and the older version supports seamless SSH tunnelling if you have
older versions of Windoze.

http://www.southrivertech.com/products/webdrive/index.html

It costs money (not a huge amount) but presents the remote 'share'
(however you choose to connect to it) as a completely transparent
Windows drive of your choice - including caching options.  Very nice, we
use it for some remote access needs around the place.

I've got it talking to a Debian server via SFTP and the Debian server
has all the NT drive shares mounted that the user wants.  I use autofs
to mount the relevant shares under the relevant user's home directory
with appropriate permissions when they request it via WebDrive.  Works
very well and is very good for users who can't grok FTP and non Windoze
Explorer interfaces (common story around here).

Before I started here, the above was achieved by having the unfirewalled
NT box directly on the Internet and the clients directly connecting to
the network shares *gasp*.  Not only was this insanely stupid, but it
was insanely slow and insanely error-prone.  Now that we do it the way
described, we don't have any file-locking abilities, but at least it
works :)

Ryan