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[Ian Moore]

Hello,

I've been helping out with an edubuntu system for Friends of the Earth in Birmingham UK for about 6 months now.

The system is very good and has gone down well with the users except for one final problem we have not managed to resolve.

File access permissions. Basically we have about 5 machines which users log onto with using a location specific user account.
As people often work on the same documents and files but at different times and from different workstations we saved most things to a shared directory called 'public'.

This directory is located in the home directory of the server alongside all of the user accounts home directories.

When somebody creates a file and saves it to the Public directory unfortunately they're are no write privelages or sometimes no read privelages for the other users. We did try playing about with groups but had no success. Also we did chmod everthing on mass a few times and thought of maybe having a cron job to do this chmod regularily but thought this a bit of a bodge.

The partial solution we found was to connect to this public directory using a samba share, shortcut link located on the desktop. This was already setup anyway for our Window machine on the network. 
This works well except for the fact that some of the programs we use, when we go to the file open menu from the browser the desktop samba share shortcut is not visible. Hence the only way to navigate to the file or folder is by going through the conventional directory structure. This results in the file being saved with its permissions as 744 or similar.

Any ideas? We're really happy with the system but this small detail is a bit of a thorn in the side at the moment.
Also note that some of our users have never seen linux  so the system has to be easy to learn.
We're using it as a fairly typical office setup we think. Shared file server, samba printer, email on the server via IMAP, intranet WIKI, sql database with php front-end.

 Thanks Ian