Subject: Limit Number of Times a User can DL a File?

From: "James L. McGill" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Jun 1997 16:56:24 -0500 (CDT)

Please do not flame me for asking, but this one comes from my 
manager.  I have already said I do not think it can be done easily,
if at all.

I have a directory containing a file, and I will be using a true
authentication name/password, not anonymous.  

I would have to ensure that a user may download a particular file 
no more than THREE times.  (I hate this.  Business people think
in terms of baseball, or maybe the number of times Dorothy had to 
click her heels together.)

At any rate, if there is something about WUFTPD that I have overlooked
that can handle this situation for me, I'd be much obliged to hear
ideas for a solution.  I have suggested expiring the password after
a specified amount of time, and other pure unix concepts, but I do 
not even know why they want to do this "3 times" deal.

If there is a way, trivial or not, to just quietly deliver this
and be my usual heroic matter-of-fact can-do unix guy, it would be
cool.  If I can just say "No, you can't do that with FTP" that's
cool too.

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From: "Mark W. de Raad" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 7 Jun 1997 00:02:57 +0000 ()

> cool.  If I can just say "No, you can't do that with FTP" that's

This sort of thing would be much easier to setup under HTTP than FTP
using a simple CGI script with login - you can keep track exactly of
who is doing what/where/when/how many times etc etc... I think the 
FTP protocol is too 'open' to allow this type of restriction... 

Mmm.. heroic Unix guy to the rescue? Try running a 5 million hit/month
WWW server of a p100 with 32mb ram *chuckle* :p hehehe funny world out
there huh?

Cheers,

M

Mark W. de Raad			    			o
					             _ /-_
University of South Australia                 ......(_)>(_)
Australia

Telephone: (+6115) 717 472
In Australia: 015 717 472
For Quick response, please mail: [email-masked]

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From: Anders Thulin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Jun 1997 08:15:23 +0200 (MET DST)

"James L. McGill" <[email-masked]> write:
> no more than THREE times. 

  Is it one file, shared among N users, who each have 3 goes at it?
Or is it one file, one user? After 3 times, should the file disappear,
or should it remain, but just be impossible to GET? Or, as you
suggest, should the account terminate?

  If one user, one file, file disappears after third time, it can be
done by (a) a log sniffer a la Swatch that looks for the filename in
the transfer/system logs and calls (b) a script that implements the
necessary decision logic.

  If the limit 3 is hard (never 4), this must be done in more or
less real-time. If 3 is soft (3 times, and the rest of that last day),
it could be done each night as a batch job.

  There are seldom good ways to extend Internet servers with
local policy decisions, although it is getting more and more
desirable to do so.

  This list is probably the best forum for discussing the what/where/how
of it, though.

Anders Thulin       [email-masked]        013-23 55 32
Telia Engineering AB, Teknikringen 6, S-583 30 Linkoping, Sweden