Program to address teacher's need of managing student users' permissions

[Jordan Mantha]

On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 9:15 AM, David Groos <djgroos at gmail.com> wrote:
<snip>
> From what I've heard and read on line, there was an excellent GUI program
> Sabayon which was designed to do just this.  Apparently this isn't being
> maintained and it doesn't work in Hardy or Intrepid.  I've seen that some
> including LaserJock have worked some on this lately but don't know of
> status?

Sabayon is a rather large and comprehensive program. Its design/goals
is to deliver preset "profiles" to users. Other programs sort of lock
things in a user's $HOME but Sabayon unzips a new $HOME every time.
Right now the status is that it still doesn't work. Scott Balneaves
and I worked on it a bit but kept running into bugs. I'm not sure if
he's had a chance to get further since the last I talked to him, but
I've got a few other pressing things before I can look at it again.

> Andreas Olsson and Jordan Mantha and others suggested making a simple script
> to manage group permissions, a great way to solve this need.  Andreas said
> he would write this script in PERL (his strength) as a proof of concept as
> well as to meet my class' immediate need.  Comments? thoughts?

For your immediate goal I would suggest actually that a bash shell
script would be the most straightforward way to go perhaps. While perl
can be a useful language, for the simple solution I don't think it's a
great idea. For the long term solution we should use Python because
it's easy and broadly used in Ubuntu/Edubuntu.

I think the first step is to clearly define what your immediate needs
are. What programs do you want limit access to? Do you have other
things you need to have locked down?

-Jordan