[K12OSN] Re: Personal web pages for students

[Thomas E. Haynes]

-----Original Message-----
From: k12osn-bounces at redhat.com [mailto:k12osn-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf
Of Lee Harr
Sent: Friday, September 17, 2004 4:10 PM
To: k12osn at redhat.com
Subject: [K12OSN] Re: Personal web pages for students

>The college I work for has asked that students have the ability to host 
>web content through personal web pages.  Although I am fairly new to 
>Linux, I have decided that a LAMP setup would provide this ability 
>while staying within the budgetary constraints (that is to say no money 
>has been allocated to complete this task!).
>
>I have two questions:
>1) What permissions are required on the userdir directory? =20
>2) How are other schools, colleges and universities dealing with this 
>sort of request?  In particular, how are your students uploading their 
>files to the server?  (FTP, WebDAV, etc...)

FWIW, we provide userdirectory web pages for all our students. I was the one
who set the server up, etc. We have about 800 users on this machine.

We are in a Windows AD environment. The samba server authenticates off the
PDC, so I create the user directories via batch in webmin. In webmin, I set
the "create permissions for home directories" to 0711. 

In the skel file, you can create template pages or whatever. If you are
using the username/private for personal file storage, set permissions on
that to 0700. The public_html directory gets 0755 permissions.

The students get the public_html user directory mapped when they log in.
They modify files and do projects there. The "uploads" are obviously via
samba, and they are restricted to the internal network. You could easily
enough set up vsftpd to provide access to the same user directories, but you
would have to handle authentication some other way.

As an example of a student folder http://student.culver.org/~fardelb/math
has some math projects done last year.

This has really worked very well for us, and Linux has made it easy. Our
budget was simliar to yours.