Permissions

[Chad Price]

At 06:19 AM 3/19/1999 +1100, William Stuart wrote:
>David Lee wrote:
>> 
>> As far as I can see (please correct me!) it seems impossible to say "in
>> directory-A I want new files to have group-1 and permission ABC, but in
>> directory-B I want group-2 and permissions XYZ".
>> 
>> Such control is applied at the "share" level, but individual management of
>> 14,000 shares seems not feasible.  We would use the "[homes]" share, which
>> is defined singly and easily;  this is automatically cloned as user
>> requests come in.  Thus all users get the same default umask etc, which
>> applies to all their directories and files.  (Again, someone please
>> correct me if this is wrong.)
>
>Can't you use the "inculde" feature to do group based smb.conf's?  I
>think that might work for you ...
>
>For example, your main smb.conf could include [global], [homes], and
>common shares, then on a group or user basis, you can include other
>shares.

I'm not so sure that Samba (or any other system based on the NT model of
non-tree-structured domains) is appropriate when you have 14,000 users and
1,000 groups.  For strictly PC support, I think the Novell model works
better and scales better because of the NDS  support.

For that number of users and groups to be manageable with NT-like
networking, one would have to require very strict conformity in system
setups, and even then, it is really pushing your luck to expect it to not
devolve into chaos as changes to the setup occur through time.

Honestly, just because you have a hammer doesn't mean it is the right tool
for the job; and maybe getting another tool is a better solution and that
probably needs to be addressed as a management decision rather than
attempting a technical solution. (And I don't know where the decision came
from, so I'm not trying to throw stones - I'm just suggesting that a
rethink of the problem may be warrented.)

Chad

Chad Price
Systems Manager
University of Nebraska Medical Center
600 S 42nd St
Omaha, NE 68506-6495
cprice at molbio.unmc.edu
(402) 559-9527 
(402) 559-4077 (FAX)