The Linus (Samba) new guy

First off, I'm a new guy when it comes to Linux. I'm mainly a Windows
admin, but I want to start using Linux in a big way.

I just took over the role of net admin for a small company That has
mainly XP and NT machines and a Red Hat Linux (Samba) file server. The
old admin set up Samba as follows:

/public -> for department shares (users - read, managers - read &
write)
/home/<user name> -> for storing personal documents (Word, Excel,
ect.)

There are also some network installed programs (mainly data files)
that allow the managers group to read & write to the data. It is set
up as follows:

/public/<program name>

The problem is that anyone in the managers group can alter all files
in the /public directory. I only want them to alter the files in the
/public/<program name> directory. How can I fix this?

I also had to install a new program on the network (again, mainly data
files) that requires almost all the staff to read & write to the data
files. I definately didn't want everyone to have read & write access
to the /public directory so I got adventurous and decided to create a
directory called QPulse. I also created a new group called qpulse
giving them ownership of the QPulse directory. In Samba, I created a
share called QPulse and directed it to the /QPulse directory. Lastly,
I put the various users into the qpulse group. When I did the network
install it appeared to work great. Files and folders went into the
/QPulse directory. On a Windows system I can map a network drive to
\\<server>\QPulse with any of the users that I put in the qpulse
group. Unfortunately only the users that are in the managers group can
use the program. I have to admit that I'm stuck, most likely from
looking at it too long. Anyway my limited Linux experience is enough
to get me into trouble.

If someone could tell me step by step how to handle my problem(s) that
would be awesome!

Cheers,

Mike

$SUBJECT made me think that the Samba project had a new maintainer!

In article <(E-Mail Removed) >,
Mike wrote:
> First off, I'm a new guy when it comes to Linux. I'm mainly a Windows
> admin, but I want to start using Linux in a big way.

Welcome ... you'll soon be enjoying your work much more now.

> The problem is that anyone in the managers group can alter all files
> in the /public directory. I only want them to alter the files in the
> /public/<program name> directory. How can I fix this?

chmod g-w /public

You might also want to adjust some permissions in /public, and check the
create mask and similar parameters if set in smb.conf.

> looking at it too long. Anyway my limited Linux experience is enough
> to get me into trouble.

Look around for a basic Unix user guide which explains permissions and
so on. Also, if I were you I'd learn a bit more about how the filesystem
hierarchy works. "man hier" and http://www.pathname.com/fhs/ will help.
Normally /usr, for example, is mostly static. Users write their data in
/home, and programs write their data in /var. For a major server I would
not want a large / partition. You can get into trouble allowing Samba
users write permission on that partition. (On all our customers' servers
we separate out /tmp and /home onto separate partitions, so users can
only write to those 2 partitions.)

> If someone could tell me step by step how to handle my problem(s) that
> would be awesome!

You might consider also hiring someone to help you over some of the
early hurdles! On one hand I'm happy to answer questions on Usenet to
help build the community, but OTOH I do this stuff for a living too.
Anyway, good luck.
--
/dev/rob0 - preferred_email=i$((28*28+28))@softhome.net
or put "not-spam" or "/dev/rob0" in Subject header to reply