Topic: Printer sharing, ibays, and group-based file acces

[Gerald Jansen]

Looking forward to the release of 3.0 tomorrow. I have been using the Beta without problems for over a week now. As a result I have a question. I have looked at the "Information Bays", interesting but what is their intended purpose. As I see it they are user specific websites. How do you envision their use?
Secondly, with regard to Printer sharing. Where do you turn it on in the E-Smith Manager?
Additionally, If the server is to function as a file server, permissions must be allows by groups as well as individuals. I hope that will be an option in the new release.

[Kim Morrison]

IBAYS: Hi Gerald!  Thanks for the post!  Ibays are easy to create,distinct sites on your e-smith server and gateway. Each ibay is defined by the administrator for read and write access, and password.  Each ibay has its own html, cgi-bin, and files directories. If you visit an ibay with a web browser, it displays the contents of the html/cig directories (the URL would be www.yourdomain.xxx/ibayname). If you visit it over Windows or Apple file sharing or FTP, you see the contents of the files directory.  So, a typical company might set up several ibays - an intranet, a customer download site, customer-specific web sites, a network shared file directory, a vendor collaboration sites. The manual has a whole chapter on ideas for using ibays.  Thanks for the post!  Kim

[Kim Morrison]

PRINT SHARING and GROUP PERMISSIONS ON FILE SHARING: The e-smith server and gateway does not come with print sharing - our philosophy is that one of the machines on your local network can provide this service just as easily.  We've had a few requests for a print server, so someday we may implement it.  As for setting group permissions on file sharing, we haven't included that feature in the server - however, this one is high on our list of features for the next version.  We recognize it is an important element of file serving.  Thanks for your post, Gerald!  Kim

[Charlie Brady]

Hi Kim and others! Kim, I'd refer you to the
LinuxJournal article from the guy at Cisco about why
server based print spooling is such a good idea -
even if a client computer actually does the printing.
Hopefully some elementary support can go in soon -
or at least a hook to put it in as an add-on would be
a very good idea. Just ship esmith with an empty
smb.conf.printing which is included into smb.conf,
then anyone can add their own printing stuff without
breaking esmith stuff.

Keep your eye on www.cups.org - I think the Common
Unix Printing System is very promising stuff.

[Kim Morrison]

PRINT SHARING - Charlie, thanks for the post! Definitely the tides of public opinion are swaying us on the print server issue.  It isn't as high a priority as some of the other ideas/plans discussed on our dev-info mailing list, but I suspect it'll become a reality within a few versions. Cheers, Kim

[Gerald Jansen]

It occured to me that there may be a work around with the group level permissions issue. If security is not an issue within a workgroup have everyone sign on with the same user(workgroup) name and password. Each user will then have access to the group folders. I tried it and it seems to work. Then if the worker wants to work "in private" they logout and logback in using their personal secure login. This technique could be used for access to common spread sheets, letters and other common documents.

[Kim Morrison]

GERALD: Yes your suggesiton would work. The administrator would create a user account for the group. This would create a user directory for that group.  Accessing the directory would require logging onto the network as that username with the group's password.  (It would also incidentally create an email account for that group but that could be ignored). Good idea! Kim