Topic: Printer sharing and file access control

[Victor Richardson]

I downloaded your E-Smith manual and found no mention of printer sharing for the internal network. Is it not supported? Can I group individuals to specific printers? Are all shared files totally public or is there some method of restricting access? Also, in the internal network can specific users have access to files on other's drives w/ authorization? Am I making sense?

[Joseph Morrison]

Hello Victor, thanks for your post! PRINTER SHARING: Our product does not currently support printer sharing. One solution is to dedicate a Windows machine for printer sharing. Another possibility - if you are comfortable working with Linux - is to modify our configuration to accomodate printer sharing. It isn't difficult - but it is something that we don't provide support for since there is such a wide range of printers out there.

[Joseph Morrison]

FILE SHARING: Victor, the new version of our product has many file sharing options. There are directories for individual users, as well as "ibays", a new concept that we are introducing. An "ibay" is a file sharing area. You can create as many as you want, and define read/write access policies for each one. They are linked into the ftp server, web server, etc. - so they can be used for internal file sharing, intranets, password-protected web or ftp sites, etc. Very simple and flexible! Regarding the last part of your question: if a user enables file sharing on their desktop machine, the e-smith server and gateway doesn't get in the way of other machines accessing those shared files. The access policies only apply to files stored on the e-smith server and gateway itself. Hope this helps.

[Victor Richardson]

Perfect! Thanks for ironing out those details.