GNOME-Samba interface

[Joe Shaw <joe off net>]

Thanks Miguel, I'll take a look at the terminal stuff.

Well, since I've been working on it, I've noticed a few (unrelated)
problems that I want to throw out so I can get everyone's opinion on the
best way to do it.

1) Samba needs to be run as root. That would imply that this program needs
to be run as root, as it will have to write to a config file and restart
Samba any time changes are made. Obviously, most of the time you don't
want to run GNOME as root. I remember a while back someone talking about a
program that would rootify a program being run (gsu?). I haven't heard
anything about it recently. Does it exist and would it suit my purposes
here?

2) As I said before, Samba must be restarted. Until I can snag a
Debian CD, I don't have any modern distributions to test this on other
than Red Hat. The concern is how to restart Samba that will be happy for
all distributions and even other UNIX flavors. Probably the easiest way
around this is a configuration option, no? Again, it's a root problem (at
least on Red Hat) because although /etc/rc.d/init.d/smb is world
executeable, a regular user can't successfully execute a 'smb restart'.

3) The smb.conf file uses a similar configuration to the gnome-config
module, only it is much less strict. It allows spaces just about anywhere
and allows # and ; to show comments. I tried loading one into the
gnome-config and it just quit when it came across a comment. Fortunately,
smb.conf has an include statement so that other files can be loaded right
in. While it would be okay for non-root users to edit a config file to be
included in smb.conf, smb.conf itself cannot be edited by anyone except
root, so it is not possible to change "profiles" if you are not root. And
again, it takes root perms to force these changes into effect.

So, how shall we deal with these issues? :)

Thanks,
Joe