Network and HD Permissions

squidthing

My family has two computers, my iBook and a PowerMac that everyone else shares. They are networked with AirPort. We also have a FireWire drive for backups, which we share by moving it from one computer to the other.



I know very little about UNIX permissions and would like to set up access restrictions on the FireWire drive. Either by learning about permissions or getting a piece of software to do it for me, or maybe a bit of Both.



There is one user account on my iBook, I'll call it A1. There is also a user account A2 with an identical name and password on the PowerMac, so I can unrestrictedly access either of the accounts home folders from either of the computers over the network. On the PowerMac there are also four other accounts I, C, H and F. All the accounts on both computers are administrators.



I would like to change the permissions on the FireWire drive so that anyone has read or write access to its root level. However there are folders within the root level. These should have their privileges set up so that only the user who created them has access to them.



Is this possible? How should I go about setting this up, and learning the basics of permissions in Mac OS X.



Any advice will be very much appreciated.



Andrew

gpark

I've never setup servers, or such thing in mac since, I'm the only one in my family using a mac.



But I guess, I'll give you some help, since I've setup my servers using linux and BSD.



try learning



chmod

and

chown



chown is who owns the folder. Whether it is root, etc. A simple command for chowning "/home" for "joe" would be (both folders and all files and folders under the folder).

Code:

chown -R joe:joe /home







If you only want just the folder

take out "-R"



joe <-- is the user

after :

joe <-- is the group.



since you want people to have access to such folder. May be creat a group called, "access_firewire"



and have it as



root:access_firewire



all people under access_firewire will have the same permission applied in "chmod". which I will describe later.





chmod is permission level for users.

three digit numbers represent whether the folder is Readable/Writable/Executable.



for example

700 would mean for "/home"



joe can "READ WRITE and EXECUTE" files.

people under group access_firewire cannot "READ WRITE AND EXECUTE" files

others cannot "READ WRITE AND EXECUTE"



770 would mean for "/home"



joe can "READ WRITE AND EXECUTE" files.

people under group "access_firewire" can "READ WRITE AND EXECUTE"

others cannot "READ WRITE AND EXECUTE"



you might want to do 700 for specific folders for people specific users.



and 770 for all the people under group.



try googling and learn about those numbers.

both chmod and chown.



i can certainly help you if you need more questions.

[email protected]



Tom

gpark

and I would setup some quota, and stuff so that people use certain amount in certain partitions.



also you might want to make a "share" account where people do their share. Its easier to take care of one "share" account than many other accounts.



what I did with my "Linux" file cluster server, was to create a directory for each user for private use. I made a public directory for each user, so that they can have ther "own" files published so that other users can see it.



I've created a share account and a share folder where all users have access to it.



So i didn't even grant any root permission to anybody but me, the admin.



Yeah, granting root permission to everybody would be a bad thing. (real bad.)

high_desert_mac

Quote:

Originally posted by SquidThing

.................



I know very little about UNIX permissions and would like to set up access restrictions on the FireWire drive. Either by learning about permissions or getting a piece of software to do it for me, or maybe a bit of Both.



......................



I would like to change the permissions on the FireWire drive so that anyone has read or write access to its root level. However there are folders within the root level. These should have their privileges set up so that only the user who created them has access to them.



Is this possible? How should I go about setting this up, and learning the basics of permissions in Mac OS X.



Any advice will be very much appreciated.



Andrew

I've done this before...... ......try right-click (control-click if you have a single button mouse) on the HD icon. Go to "Get Info" and in the window that appears click on the arrow left of "Ownership & Permissions". Click on the Lock icon to unlock it and proceed to change to ....whatever!



(Sure hope I got that right)

gpark

sure, that helps. forgot about the GUI. hehe.



tom

squidthing

Thank you for your advice everyone. I've tried this before and wasn't quite sure if I understood it correctly. I've got it to work properly now. I think part of the problem before was that "Ignore Ownership" was selected for the Hard Drive. I should probably learn the Command Line way as well.



Many Thanks



Andrew

tompage

I've also found that sometimes after making a large number of changes to permissions on folders/files on a volume, you may need to run "Repair Disk Permissions" in the Disk Utility application before another networked computer takes notice of them.



The permissions can become corrupted and running this repair usually sorts out most problems, especially if for example you tick the "Apply to all enclosed items" checkbox in the Get Info window to apply your new permissions to all subfolders/files within a folder.



Unlike repairing a hard disk, you do not need to start up from a separate volume (eg system CD or external HD) to run the Repair Disk Permissions on the normal start-up volume.