[K12OSN] Permissions for students and teachers

[Les Mikesell]

Bill Moseley wrote:
> Any suggestions how to set up permissions for students and teachers?
> 
> I want students to have their own accounts not viewable by other
> students. That's easy.
> 
> Ideally, I'd like to provide teachers rwx to the students $HOME so that
> they can review a student's work, and also a way for teachers to drop
> in files in a way that only that student can see that file.
> 
> In addition, it would probably be useful to have a directory for each
> grade (and for each class within that grade) to use for sharing
> documents where all have read and write access for collaborative work.
> 
> How do you set permissions to allow students and teachers to share
> work?

If you have the default umask of 002, everything should be group rwx 
already unless it was created by root, and in the RedHat scheme of 
things everyone has their own group.  Just add the teachers to each 
student's group and make the home directory rwx by group if it isn't 
already and you'll have most of what you want.  The only tricky part is 
that files created by teachers in a student's directory may not be 
writable by the student unless the teacher is careful to change groups 
before creating it or to change group ownership.  However, don't count 
on the students being unable to write to them - some editors will create 
a new file for changes and rename it to the old name.  For this you only 
need read access to the file and rw to the directory containing it.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    les at futuresource.com