Help Needed configuring Samba on Webserver

[Steve Fink]

Tim,

All of the procedures you outlined can be done in a script, pulling from
a file that contains the list of students.

I.E. For each $Student do (Steps 1-9)...

IMHO I would say you're probably doing your students a dis-service by
utilizing Samba to transfer their files to the web server.

In a real-world scenario they would not be uploading their work to a web
server in this manner.  No host worth their salt would allow Samba
anywhere near their web server.

Teach your students to utilize ftp and you'll add one more tool to their
arsenal.

Best,

Steve



On Fri, 2005-04-08 at 13:10 -0400, Tim Holmes wrote:
> Earlier this week, I posted a message asking for help with a number of
> problems / Projects using Fedora Core 2 or 3 within our network.  The
> responses indicated that I should go ahead and post the questions to
> this list, so here is the first one that I am having problems with
> 
> Our webserver is a Pentium 4 2Ghz server running fully up to date FC2
> with Apache and Samba installed.  
> 
> Our domain is a windows 2003 Domain using active directory.  What I want
> to be able to do is to have each student have their own directory on the
> web server that they can post their web design projects into, and then
> we have apache to use ~username addressing for their sites.  
> 
> As it stands right now, I use the following procedure to make this work,
> which is not a problem for a class of 5 students, but for a large class
> it turns into a large amount of work
> 
> Procedure to setup student for samba access
> 
> 1 Create the user directory on the webserver
> 2. Create the linux user - system/users and groups
> 3. Create a public_html directory under their home directory
> 4. chmod home directory 755
> 5. chmod public_html directory 755
> 6. chown home directory -R to user
> 7. chgrp home directory to apache
> 8. create samba user -- system-config-samba
> 9. input windows password into samba as samba password
> 
> 
> everything should then work
> 
> This procedure works.  It takes 3 - 5 minutes per itineration, which
> gets tedious at best.  The problem comes in the fact that next year we
> want to implement a similar system for storing all of our user files on
> our samba file server, and creating 250 accounts like this is just out
> of the question.  
> 
> I realize that I am a new linux administrator, and that my understanding
> of Linux and Samba are fairly limited, but it seems that there must be
> an easier way of accomplishing this.  The point that especially wrankles
> me is having to ask the user for their password, and then manually enter
> it into samba to get it to recognize the password, it should be able to
> authenticate against the active directory and work that way.  
> 
> I could really use some help here -- I have a class of almost 20
> students who will be starting web design projects on Wednesday of next
> week, so I would very much like to get this working before then, cuz
> otherwise Tuesday night is going to be a real pain creating all those
> users
> 
> TIM
> 
> I can be reached on list, off list at tholmes at mcaschool.net, on Yahoo IM
> at W8TAH, and on AOL IM at W8TAHHAM
> 
> TIM
> 
> Tim Holmes
>  
> IT Manager / Webmaster
> Medina Christian Academy
> A Higher Standard...
>  
> Jeremiah 33:3
> Jeremiah 29:11
> Esther 4:14
> 
>