Shared files

[David Fletcher]

On Sat, 2011-05-07 at 05:50 -0500, Roy Smith wrote:
> Hi!  I have a situation that I'd like to get some suggestions about. 
> I'm setting up Ubuntu with a total of 5 user accounts (including
> myself).  I also have around 20GB of music, video and photo files that I
> would like each account to have access to.  Instead of each user account
> having the same files in their user folder, I've though about setting up
> a separate folder that everyone can access.  So what would be the best
> security settings as far as Owner, Group and permissions would be to
> allow everyone access to these files?
> 

I've just been doing this. On my home server, I set up a suitable
directory in root (/ not root user's directory) owned by root. Under
that, there's a directory for each user - you can create them with sudo
mkdir then use sudo chown username:username to set ownership. Use ls -l
to make sure the privileges are what you want to allow everybody to read
but only owners to modify.

It's only just been set up so not thoroughly tested yet but I think it
should be OK.

I did it this way because I like to keep my more important files such as
passwords, spreadsheets, email and other documents I can't afford to
lose backed up once in a while to flash drives. Obviously I can't put
50Gb of music and photos onto one of these (or maybe I could - they keep
getting bigger all the time!) so that's why they get stored somewhere
other than the home directory. They get backed up by rsync to the
desktop machine, but sometime I need to organize off site backup for
them.

I auto mount these directories via the network using an sshfs command in
System->Preferences->Startup Applications which places an icon on the
desktop when I log in.

Dave