Re: [gnome-network]File sharing from Nautilus

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>]

On Mon, 2003-08-25 at 22:35 -0400, Daniel Brodie wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I have a few ideas regarding this and I was woundering  if they were
> feasible.
> 
> 1) gst-network: Basicly, a gst-network tool is created (or equivalent).
> root has to open up gst-network and allow user blah to share, and some
> basic share options. Blah can now share folders because of thos
> settings.
>
yes, I was talking about this yesterday with Carlos Garnacho, who is the
maintainer of the GNOME System Tools. We talked about, first, having the
shares tool re-enabled in GST (it's been disabled from the build a long
time, due to it not being fully complete and working). And, second,
offer a context menu item for folders that opens that tool.

Of course, as you say, this needs the user to know root's password

> What happens behind the scene is that gst-network creates a shared
> folder with the appropriate protocol in ~/.gnome-network/smb/ (or
> whatever). Now when a user wants to share a folder a (symbolic?) link is
> created to the folder in  ~/.gnome-network/smb/.
>
this seems to be similar to what Mac Os does, and makes it easier for
users, since they don't need to know any extra password.

> This has the added plus of having the gst backends which will allow gst
> to work for many distros and clients (do we really want to force people
> to use a specific web client?).
> 
what do you mean?

> 2) network-sudeamon: This is simmilar in a way to gdm. root sets up what
> each user can do. Now, each user has his own client app that talks with
> the deamon and asks the deamon to remove/add shares and so forth.
> Just like gdm this should all probably happen through pipes. This is
> more flexible in the sense that there isn't a need for symbolic link
> 'hacks', and could give the user more control over things like should
> the share be anonymous/r+w/etc... The biggest disadvantage is that if
> there is a security whole, it means the user could even gain root
> access, while with the first idea, there is no interaction between a
> user and root.
> Also, a gst-backend abstraction type system could be used here as well
> (which I think is very important).
> 
yes, there have been also discussions about using a system-wide daemon
that the user apps communicate to for this kind of thing.

> Are these ideas even pratical?
> 
yes, they are. In fact, all solutions have their good and bad things, so
I guess discussing deeply about each one would make us come to the best
solution.

There are indeed other solutions mentioned on the thread in
nautilus-list, like adding support to libsmbclient/samba to let normal
users share directories. This seems to me the best solution so far. it
would even be perfect if we could do the same for NFS, FTP, etc.
Although, in this case (having to use 'n' libraries), maybe the
system-wide daemon idea is a better solution.

Don't know, I'm not really sure what the best is :-(

cheers