[Samba] A shared space between students and their teacher !!!

[alaanizar at iihem.ac.ma]

Hi Robert,

Thanks for responding.

Well, I solved the problem for my situation with no need to other script.

Here is what I did, and it really works just fine.

1.  I created a share in smb.conf as below:

------------------------------------------------
#A share shared by faculty and students
[Computer_Science]
   comment = Computer Courses
   path = /home/shares/computer_science
   public = no
   writable = yes
   write list = @computer_science
   read only = no
   create mask = 0660
   directory mask = 0770
   force group = faculty
-------------------------------------------------

the group "computer_science" consists of the professor of the course and the students enrolled in
that course. In fact it's their second group.

The "faculty" group, as indicated by its name, consists of professors of Computer Science.

2.  I craeted the directories as follows

# mkdir /home/shares/computer_science
# chown root.computer_science /home/shares/computer_science
# chmod 1770 /home/shares/computer_science

that's all.

In that case students are able to write on that share and see the work of other users, but can not
copy/paste or look at the other's work. they got access denied whenever they try to access a file
in that folder which is not theirs. This is done by the sticky bit: chmod 1770, the "1". That's
great. Which means that student A can not see, copy/paste, alter or even delete the work of
student B.

Given the tag "force group = faculty" in smb.conf, faculty members can read and delete the work of
students in that group.

Put all together, a file in that share will be shared ONLY between the auther (student) and the
professor.

For my case, in runs smootly and very fine.

Hope my experience could help someone else.


> HI Alaa
>
> I had an almost identical problem to this and solved it as follows:-
>
> Create a share that students can save work into
> Create another share that staff can access
>
> Write a small helper script or program (I wrote one in C) that is invoked as a cron job once
every minute to empty the files in the student accessible share and move them to the staff
accessible
> directory. The program also changed the owner to staff etc
>
> The program I wrote also changed the filename to include a
> date/timestamp so that if a student submitted the same work twice staff could easily see that
there were two (possibly different)
> copies.
>
> Because the original files were removed from the student accessible share - no problems with
students editing "completed" work
>
> Permissions were straightforward as well - read/write access for students to first share/directory
>
> Read/write access for staff only to second share/directory.
>
> I can send the C source if it helps but hopefully you will get the idea from this description.
>
> Cheers
>
> Richard Smart
>
> On 9 Jul 2005 at 13:56, alaanizar at iihem.ac.ma wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> Last week I implemented samba a sa file server and domain controller for more than 150 computers
(Win 2000 and XP). Everything is working just fine.
>
> However, computer science faculty wanted a share for each course in which students can upload
their homework once done and teacher download them for correction. Yet, students can have the
right to write on that share but not delete the work of other students.
>
> I did a test and works fine but students' work are delete-able by other users given the below
share configuration:
>
> ------------------------------------------------
> #A share shared by faculty and students
> [Computer_Science]
>    comment = Computer Courses
>    path = /home/shares/computer_science
>    public = no
>    writable = yes
>    write list = @cmp251a
>    read only = no
>    create mask = 0660
>    directory mask = 0770
>    force group = faculty
> -------------------------------------------------
>
> I created folders inside the path, for example, cmp340, cmp251, cmp450.
>
> I gave right access to folders to the corresponding groups so that students can write on that
folders, but once the file is stored on that folder, faculty members can access it and download.
However, other users that belong to that group can access it also.
>
>
> What should I do? Please Help!!!
>
>
> regards,
>
>
>
>
> --
> Alaa Nizar
> Network and System Administrator
> Phone   : 0021269437087
> Web site: http://www.iihem.ac.ma
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-- 
Alaa Nizar
Network and System Administrator
Phone   : 0021269437087
Web site: http://www.iihem.ac.ma