[Denis Melnikov]

Hi,

Did you try setting umask? What are the permissions of a
newly created file? What `umask` says?

Denis

> 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