Restricted view of the filesystem

["Sayamindu Dasgupta" <sayamindu randomink org>]

Hi all,
In a deployment scenario, the desktop administrator should ideally be
able to define a restricted set of directories which users in a
profile will be able to view.  For example, a user may only be allowed
to view the contents of his home directory and its subdirectories.

I have been figuring out methods to implement this, and the general
idea is something like this:

1. List of allowed directories are stored in GConf key
/desktop/gnome/lockdown/allowed_dirs
2. gnome-settings-daemon reads this list and exports it via xsettings
3. nautilus uses gconf to read the list and allows access for users
while the gtk+ filechooser (using the GNOME-VFS backend) reads it from
xsettings
4. additionally both of the above use gnome-vfs to figure out
user-visible volumes and allow access to them since policy on those
are set by HAL anyway..

However, I have been wondering if it is a better idea to check for
allowed directories from within GNOME-VFS itself. A downside to this
might be that applications that may use gnome-vfs to read config
files/etc outside the set of allowed directories might break - but I'm
not sure whether apps do use gnome-vfs to access such files. The
advantage on the other hand would be that I do not have to fiddle
around with gnome-settings-daemon or xsettings, since the policies
would automatically be applicable for the gnome-vfs based backend of
the filechooser (I'm ignoring the unix backend).

Thoughts/comments/suggestions are welcome :-).

Cheers,
Sayamindu


--
Sayamindu Dasgupta
[http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]