Server Edition Questions

[minimayhem]

Hello,

Let me set the scenario before I start asking questions;

I'm a student about to move into a house with 4 other mates and we are all business information technology students, so we all use up a lot of space from downloading, storing work, as we all have between 2-4 computers each. It was decided we should have a server for our house with a LAN running from room to room, which will be connected to our server.
Currently I'm an Ubuntu user for my laptop, with desktop running windows, and I'm the only user in the house using Linux, and consequently the person thats gonna be setting up and taking care of the server, to which I have chosen Ubuntu server edition as our choice operating system, simply because I'm used to it; although I have used Gentoo in the past when I worked for an IT firm.

Here's what we're looking for, we have a hard-drive that I intend to split into two partitions, one for the server operating system and one for the files, which will be its primary use. We need each user to have authentication to their designated home folder, with absolute restriction on being able to view anyone else's files, very important because of our coursework must be done individually and etc. However we would also like a general home folder, to which everyone can access.

Is this going to be possible with Ubuntu Server Edition? When I worked last year, I maintained the offices Linux file and mail server as well as the domain windows server, so I already know how to setup Windows Server from scratch and get it working with an active directory, which I'm guessing is the weapon of choice as we dont want to have a domain, that will make things too complicated.

What are your opinions? Is this going to be possible with a not very technical Linux user, or am I just aiming to high? Will it be relativly easy to setup, or if not easy straight-forward?

Thanks for your help,

MM

[Rubberman]

So, placing /home on the second partition is good. Actually, you should create 4 partitions: /boot, swap, /, and /home. You can restrict user access to others' files by removing all group/other permissions from each /home/user directory.

chmod go-rwx /home/*

That way, only root or the user can access their files. You might want to create a /home/share directory that everyone can access for shared files (music, videos, photos, etc). Anyway, as root/admin for this server, ethics requires that you inform your mates that you can access their files, but will refrain to do so without their express permission.

[minimayhem]

Thanks for your reply,

After reading around I've decided to use Samba to specify their seperate folder locations, and use its in-built authentication methods, that way I can have the system user which will be the administrator, their own logons to access only their workspace and my own, so that I cannot access theirs. I'm intending to setup the server with automatic updates, automatic backups of file area's and of the operating system partition to ensure nothing will be lost if something bad occurs, this means I will only need to use the system user to clear up disk space or make the occasional changes, good ethics I believe.

thanks for your help,

MM

[Fermulator]

Hey there,

I have the exact same setup as you've described. All of my housemates use the server for the following services:
1. Shared File Storage (Music, Videos, House documents, etc.). These files are shared via samba, with ACL (check out setfacl and getfacl) configurations. We're all members of the server group "housemates", and housemates have access to said folders.
2. Consolidated torrent downloading. To have multiple users in the same household downloading torrents is terrible on bandwidth. I've installed torrentflux-b4rt on our server, and it downloads all of our torrents via a pretty web interface.
3. WoL - We've got some Wake-On-LAN scripts hosted via Apache. This allows us to conserve energy. The server is always on, but we can all standby/sleep our systems when not in use, and if we ever need them, the server can wake them up, and we can remote into them.

Some recommendations for setup:
* RAID - Backups are nice, but believe me, RAID is nicer. If you're storing anything remotely important on the server, I strongly recommend you use RAID1 or RAID5.
* ACLs - Used to Windows' nice "NTFS permissions"? (Allow everyone, Allow only group blah, Deny this person) Well check out the "acl" option for linux partitions. It's very close to that of Windows, and you'll find yourself at home.
* Samba - Sounds like you already discovered Samba. Indeed, this is the best (and only?) choice in a multi-OS environment.
* VM's - 3/4 of my house are actual techies. So instead of each of us having a server, we've got the primary server, and if someone wants their own server (for whatever reason), we've got VMWare server running to fill that need.

Good luck!
Feel free to PM me if you have more questions.

[minimayhem]

Ello,

Thank you Fermulator for your reply definatly gave me some very good information, just a couple of questions for you;
Have you had any trouble using Samba with Macs, as one of my housemates uses one?

Also, using torrentflux-b4rt is this done running a service on the server which allows users to log into the web based front-end? I'm guessing so as the server is CLI but just checking

Also because I'm the only technical one, and unfortunatly I have one house mate that thinks he is, which makes him very dangerous as he does make very bad mistakes, were you able to use Samba to restrict their access to only their designated folders on the server? Essentially I want the users to only be able to view their own files, and not have the capability to browse to other directories.

Thank you so much for your help!!

MM

[Fermulator]

old post, sorry, apparently I wasn't watching this thread.

Did you get your stuff sorted out?

To answer your Qs:
* Not much experience with samba on MAC, but I have done it once, and it seemed to work OK.
* torrentfulx-b4rt uses a PHP web backend, so yes, you get a shiny front end
* using ACLs coupled with SAMBA server on your fileserver, yes, you can ensure that "dangerous guy" can't break other people's stuff. Just do not make him a member of GroupX that might allow write abilities.