[K12OSN] Dropbox directory permissions

David Hopkins dahopkins429 at gmail.com
Mon Mar 5 19:50:36 UTC 2007


Actually, nothing if the kid knows how to use a terminal session.  If the
kids know how to use terminal sessions, then they could also just share
files directly from each others accounts though and bypass of this unless
you lock the top level accounts so that they can't change their own
directories permissions.  Not sure how to do that.

Now, once the file is dropped, the directory permissions don't allow them to
list the dropbox directory contents.  The files get the permissions
specified, but the directory is set so that they can't see the contents.
'course now I need to go back and re-evaluate how I did this.  The tech
teacher wasn't too concerned about possible issues since if cheating occurs,
there are ways to address such issues and use it as another opportunity to
teach values.  I also have a cron job that runs every 5 minutes to change
the permissions just in case as well.

As for manually running scripts, the tech teacher doesn't want to deal with
anything that has syntax.  Double-click, drag-drop, right-click are all
good.  Opening a terminal session and running a command is not on the list
of good things.

Long term (next year), I will find a better solution but right now this
works well enough.

Sincerely,
Dave Hopkins


On 3/5/07, Robert Arkiletian <robark at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 3/5/07, David Hopkins <dahopkins429 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > It is about as basic as you can get.  I created a script called
> > copy_files_to_dropbox and put it /usr/sbin with a+x permissions.
> >
> > The launcher executes the script passing the filename to the
> script.  Then,
> > neglecting the code for popping up the confirmation window, the script
> > presently is just
> >
> > chmod 755 $1
> > cp $1 /Dropbox_directory/.
> >
>
> I thought about this but what's to stop a kid from just copying it
> him/herself without chmoding it. Also,  shouldn't your chmod be 750
> since you don't want others to be able to read and thus copy it out of
> Dropbox_directory?
> And what about /temp where everyone has read/write access?
>
> The reason I am being so anal about the security is because I give my
> classes programming tests and I don't want them being able to copy
> anothers solution. After having a chat with a friend about this,  I
> think the best solution may be to simply ask the kids to save their
> solution as their username.py in their own home dir. Then I write a
> script that I run as root at the end of class to collect the
> solutions.
> Concerning /temp: will anything bad happen if I temporarily (during
> the exam) disable writing or reading to /temp?
>
> --
> Robert Arkiletian
> Eric Hamber Secondary, Vancouver, Canada
> Fl_TeacherTool http://www3.telus.net/public/robark/Fl_TeacherTool/
> C++ GUI tutorial http://www3.telus.net/public/robark/
>
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