Help Needed in several areas -- FTP

[Kevin Fries]

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Tim Holmes wrote:
| Ok -- First off -- Thanks to all who helped me getting samba working --
| it works perfectly and is very little effort to administer, and through
| the help of one of our graduates, I got NFS up and running tonight so I
| am sharing home directories across the network -- also very nice
|
|
| In the course of our discussion of SAMBA someone suggested that I am
| actually doing a disservice to our students by allowing them to post
| files to their web sites over samba shares, and that I should actually
| make them do it via FTP because that is much more likely how they will
| be doing it.
|
| After some consideration, I have reached the following conclusion, I
| will have my Front Page class (8th graders) using FTP, and the 9th Grade
| class (Dreamweaver) using direct file transfers.

You got really bad advice!

The correct tool for this job is WebDAV.  It is an extension to apache;
uses apache style security; and is automatically built into those
Windows clients.  WebDAV was designed to solve one problem, and only one
problem... Webpage file update.

Since you are already using Apache to serve those web pages, it seems
silly to then use a different tool (either FTP or samba) to then update
the files.  Both your Frontpage and your Dreamweaver should support
WebDAV right out of the box.  Windows machines should also be able to
map drive letters to it if you want.

You will be doing your students a bigger service in making them realize
that there are lots of tools out there to get a job done.  And, well
designed tools allow you to do your job, while hiding the ugliness.
While SAMBA does an OK job of this, and FTP does a good job of this, the
truly correct tool for the job is DAV.  The greatest testimony of this
is that I would be giving you the same advice if you had a Windows
server.  That is ubiquitous computing.

- --
Kevin Fries
Network Administrator
Hydrologic Consultants, Inc of Colorado
(303) 969-8033    FAX: (303) 969-8357
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