Changing File Permissions to allow multiple users file access

[Kohei Yoshida]

On Tue, 2002-01-22 at 17:58, Ryan Yetter wrote:
> I have a question regarding using Samba for file sharing with Win2k
> clients.  I have a client whom I would like to set up a Linux server for
> using Samba for filesharing, but there is one thing I haven't figured
> out how to do that I could've sworn I had done before on my own server
> in the past.  My client has several users whom share files on a regular
> basis.  Like Person A will have access to Person B's files and Person C
> will have access to Person B's files, but Person B won't have access to
> either Person A or Person C's files nor will Person A have access to
> Person C's files or vice versa.  Now, with an NT server, you just go
> into the directory or the file right-click on it, choose properties and
> then Security.  Now I can do this with the samba share too, but it won't
> let me add users whom can access the file from the domain.  I have their
> home directory on the linux server mapped to the H: drive on the
> workstation through Samba and their My Documents folder has been moved
> to H:\My Documents.  Everything seems to work fine other than this one
> issue with trying to allow only certain users to have access to files.

This is a normal behavior since each file or directory on Linux is only
associated with one user and one group.  But you can add POSIX ACL
support to your Linux server to allow setting permissions for multiple
users a la Windows NT/2000.

There is a POSIX ACL implementation for ext2/ext3, which can be
downloaded from http://acl.bestbits.at.  XFS also comes with its own
implementation of POSIX ACL, but I don't know if Samba supports it.  I
believe it does, but I'm just not 100% positive.

Hope this helps.


Kohei