Re: File sharing with Nautilus

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Sun, 2003-08-17 at 22:04, Superfrog wrote:
> What's the status of being able to share directories directly from
> Nautilus ?
> 
> The ideal is similar to windoze, kde and Mac os X. Right click on a
> directory -> share as -> dialog.
> 
> Looking at the way other do, it would be very interesting that one
> single dialog allows to choose :
> 
> 	- Folder name to share
> 	- Display
> 	- Access level (Read / Write)
> 	- Protocol (smb / http / ftp / nfs)
> 
> The ideal of different protocol is a great advantage. I've seen people
> using kde working with read only HTTP shares in our company. Any others
> can connect to the shared computers with only a web browser ! That very
> handy.
> 
> For smb, it obvious the benefits it provides... but destop users MUST be
> able to share folders without going to command line editing... and
> Nautilus is the place to do that !
> 
> Looking at tools like redhat-config-samba is very interesting : it only
> update the /etc/samba file with a very simple addition. The same can be
> done for /etc/httpd.conf. Same goes to KDE.
> 
> Any status and ideals / feasibility / comments of such feature ?

I have been giving this a lot of though in the context of the red hat
distribution (being a developer of said project), and my current thoughs
about this is:

It's quite hard to do this in general. So much depends on the exact
setup of the distribution in use. However, if you control the
distribution (or can manually tweak stuff to fit your personal install)
it might be possible. 

I'd like to integrate into Nautilus some minimal code to parse the samba
config files. This means we can show "shared" emblems for directories
that are shared. Then external code can use the context menu plugin
system to add a "share this folder" operation. The hard part is writing
the script to safely add shares to the samba configuration, in a way
that will not break if the smb.conf file has been manually edited
before, and in a way that isn't a huge security hole.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a globe-trotting arachnophobic dwarf searching for his wife's true 
killer. She's a wealthy antique-collecting archaeologist with only herself to 
blame. They fight crime!