Subject: User access to multiple directories

From: Duncan Hill <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Apr 1999 18:24:21 -0400 (EDT)

Greetings.  I need a bit of input on how to solve a problem I have.

Several of the staff/faculty here maintain several different web
pages, scattered throughout the webserver docs tree.  Most of them are
using Netscape publishing to accomplish this, but a few have requested
FTP access.

I have been able to set them up with real access (guest won't work in
this case I don't think) to their primary directory, but I now need
an easy way (is there such a thing?) to give them access to their
secondary directory.

Example:
User fred has a primary directory under the web tree of /courses/fred/
They also maintain the Automobile Club pages under /clubs/auto/

They will log in to /courses/fred/ right now, but I can't think of an
easy way to only let them then access /clubs/auto/ without having full
roam over the rest of the server.  They are set up in their own group,
so if anything, they only have read access to /etc/passwd etc (which
is shadowed, and 99% don't even know what a unix server looks like)
and no delete access.

Any ideas I can try?

--

Duncan Hill			Sapere aude
One net to rule them all, One net to find them,
One net to bring them all, and using Unix bind them.

---

From: James McMahon <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 09:11:46 +1000

Why not simply use two logins - to use your example, give fred a login
"fred" to access /courses/fred,
and a login"auto" to access /clubs/auto.  This way you can have both users
as guests and restrict their access to only those directories (if you wish
to have the appropriate chroot file tree).

Alternatively, you could chroot them to /courses and /clubs, have the
chroot files in these directories (bin, etc, lib ... ) and use unix
permissions to restrict them to only changing their specific area.  You
could also have them automatically cd'd to the required directory in this
model using the homedir/./logindir syntax in etc/passwd.

Hope this helps,

James