[K12OSN] Dropbox question

Peter Scheie petre at maltzen.net
Thu Dec 21 00:51:44 UTC 2006


Perhaps I misunderstand the requirements, but how about this:

1. Create a folder under /home called dropbox.
2. Set the owner and group for /home dropbox to the ID & primary group 
of the teacher.
3. Set the permissions on /home/dropbox to 2777.  This will allow the 
students to put their files into dropbox, and the group for those files 
will become that of the teacher.
4. Make sure the default umask is 002.  This is the default for regular 
(non-system) users.
5.  Create a symlink to /home/dropbox in each student's ~/Desktop/ 
folder.  You could put a script in /etc/profile.d/ that looks for the 
symlink and if it doesn't exist, creates it.

Now when students log in, they'll always have a folder on their desktop 
that is a symlink to the dropbox directory/folder.  They can put their 
files in that; the teacher, who will also have such a symlinked folder 
on the desktop, can read, write, and delete all the student files in 
there.  And while the students can read each others files, they can only 
delete their own.  This method requires no script-via-cron to change the 
permissions all the time.  If you're worried about students deleting the 
whole /home/dropbox folder, they can't since they'd have to delete all 
the files within first, and they can't do that; you might need to put a 
hidden file owned by root in there to prevent someone from deleting it 
while it's empty.

Petre

dahopkins at comcast.net wrote:
> Jim,
> 
> Thanks for the response and the script.  I was kind-of suspecting that I would need such a solution, and very grateful that you already have it!
> 
> sorry about the form of the response.  comcast has again placed k12osn at redhat.com on a blacklist as spam and until I can convince them otherwise, I have to watch the listserve manually, then compose emails to respond as needed. Aaargghh!!
> 
> Sincerely,
> Dave Hopkins
> 
> 
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