EasyFileSharing

Revision 12 as of 2007-11-05 21:20:22

Clear message

Please check the status of this specification in Launchpad before editing it. If it is Approved, contact the Assignee or another knowledgeable person before making changes.

Summary

Make file sharing between ubuntu boxes in a lan/wlan easy.

Release Note

TBD

Rationale

To share a directory in ubuntu it is currently required to install either nfs or samba (neither is available in the default install) and to have super user rights.

Use Cases

  • Alice wants to share the photos on her laptop with some friends.
  • Conrad wants his video folder to be visible from the house's shared media PC.

Design

Check the various options:

Test/Demo Plan

TBD

BoF agenda and discussion

Use this section to take notes during the BoF; if you keep it in the approved spec, use it for summarising what was discussed and note any options that were rejected.

  • merge spec with EasyNetworkFilesending

  • current complicated, requires admin privs, have to pick between NFS and samba.
    • next samba upload will support net usershare out of the box.
      • but requires installing samba by default, some security issues.
  • Want:
    • installed by default, does not open a port, nonadmins can do it, straightforward, shows up in network hsares for WIndows and MacOSX
      • Need to use samba if want all platform.
        • gnome user share works great, except winXP can't view it since it's webdav (don't see it in network neighborhood)
          • samba services will have more browsing capabilities (via zeroconf support) by hardy, most likely.
  • Any custom-sharing system we have needs to be on the other user's computer somehow
    • Empathy is not there yet, likely won't be available by Hardy. Watch out for Empathy and Telephathy for Hardy+1
    • Need root for samba sharing (this is not true when you setup "net usershare" and use its gui: nautilus-share). Could try to have dbus activation for samba sharing ... Cannot have samba installed by default since it won't help without breaking policy.
      • Can't expect Windows users to install anything, really.
      • At moment it asks you if you want to install samba or nfs, but nfs isn't really useful. Should remove nfs option since it's never easy here.
      • NFS requires both server and client to be root, samba only requires server to be root. This gives us a better use case for samba over NFS.
      • Samba is eventually implementing encryption out of the box, which isn't the case for NFS.
    • Users get confused with samba - share the folder, connect from windows, given a username/password dialogue. If they enter linux username/password it won't work.
    • We need to come up with a way to keep in sync the Linux and samba accounts in sync.
    • configuring samba to use pam for authentication requires using clear text passwords between the client and the server. This will likely break compatibility with Windows clients and is no longer supported out of the box by Windows XP and Vista.
    • generate smb passwords by default, even if we don't use them until we install samba. pam_smbpass implements this feature.
      • can do some pam magic to generate these passwords on system upgrades. Steve Langasek can help with this.
      • anytime user types password into any pamaware application it'll do this.
        • In release notes: need to log in as a user to get samba password working. If you upgrade and then never log in with a user you won't be able to share with that user
  • Need to have netusershare enabled by default on samba
    • Need to make sure samba has netusershare enabled after upgrade:
      • Modify the smb.conf file to add the net usershare options from the postinst script.
      • Patch samba to enable net usershare by default.
  • need to review defaults as well (eg guest-accessible share by default as a non-root user). Good time to review a general samba audit...
  • make sure to add people to the right group (admin) will become members of sambashare group.
    • Since changing group settings, need to make a debconf note.
    • make sure that nautilus-share notifies correctly the user if he's not part of the sambashare group.
  • samba does not talk to avahi with mdns at the moment. samba works with mac osx and windows.
    • if we get a better protocol in the future we can always multi-protocol share. ( eg webdav, enlightenment/telepathy, etc.)
    • KDE has some pretty broken samba stuff kde-tools break samba at the moment for sharing samba (old and really nasty) -- KDE 4 job.

Ideas

CategorySpec