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• Launchpad Entry: easy-file-sharing

• Packages affected: ?

Summary

Make file sharing between ubuntu boxes in a lan/wlan easy.

Release Note

TBD

Rationale

To share a directory in ubuntu it is currently required to install either nfs or samba (neither is available in the default install) and to have super user rights.

Use Cases

• Alice wants to share the photos on her laptop with some friends.
• Conrad wants his video folder to be visible from the house's shared media PC.

Design

Check the various options:

• samba/nfs as it is currently used via shares-admin or nautilus-share (it's using "net usershare" from samba http://gentoo.ovibes.net/nautilus-share/mediawiki-1.4.4/index.php/Accueil)

• gnome-user-share (http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/gnome-user-share) - requires apache2

• giver (http://code.google.com/p/giver/) - c# based

• gshare (http://yimports.com/~cpinto/projects/gnome/gshare) mono + ftp + avahi. in universe. claims to allow sharing to macs, and windows with bonjour installed (or anyone happy to type in ftp://ip:port)

• woof (http://www.home.unix-ag.org/simon/woof.html) + nice frontend

• telekinesis (http://techn.ocracy.org/telekinesis/)

Test/Demo Plan

TBD

BoF agenda and discussion

Use this section to take notes during the BoF; if you keep it in the approved spec, use it for summarising what was discussed and note any options that were rejected.

• merge spec with EasyNetworkFilesending

• current complicated, requires admin privs, have to pick between NFS and samba.
  • next upload will have netusershare from Samba
    • but requires installing samba by default, some security issues.
• Want:
  • installed by default, does not open a port, nonadmins can do it, straightforward, shows up in network hsares for WIndows and MacOSX
    • Need to use samba if want all platform.
      • gnome user share works great, except winXP can't view it since it's webdav (don't see it in network neighborhood)
        • samba services will have more browsing capabilities by hardy, most likely.
• Any custom-sharing system we have needs to be on the other user's computer somehow
  • Empathy is not there yet, likely won't be available by Hardy. Watch out for Empathy and Telephathy for Hardy+1
  • Need root for samba sharing. Could try to have dbus activation for samba sharing ... Cannot have samba installed by default since it won't help without breaking policy.
    • Can't expect Windows users to install anything, really.
    • At moment it asks you if you want to install samba or nfs, but nfs isn't really useful. Should remove nfs option since it's never easy here.
    • NFS requires both server and client to be root, samba only requires server to be root. This gives us a better use case for samba over NFS.
    • Samba is eventually impementing encryption out of the box, which isn't out of the box in NFS.
  • Users get confused with samba - share the folder, connect from windows, given a username/password dialogue. If they enter linux username/password it won't work.
  • We need to come up with a way to keep in sync the Linux and samba accounts in sync (which is a PAMsmbpass out of the box)
  • we will likely break compatibility with Windows9x doing this
  • generate smb passwords by default, even if we don't use them until we install samba
  • can do some pam magic to generate these passwords on system upgrades. Steve Langashek will help with this.
    • anytime user types password into any pamaware application it'll do this.
      • In release notes: need to log in as a user to get samba password working. If you upgrade and then never log in with a user you won't be able to share over that user* can have netusershare enabled by default on samba
• Need to make sure samba has netusershare enabled after upgrade here. Can edit smb.conf with upgrade patches though. If there's concern with re-enabling something someone disabled. THis way we can chagne the binary and still respect the conf file that's still there
• need to review defaults as well (eg guest-accessible share by default as a non-root user). Good time to review a general samba audit...
• make sure to add people to the right group (admin) will become members of sambashare group. Since changing group settings, need to make a debconf note.
• samba does not talk to avahi with mdns at the moment. samba works with mac osx and windows.
  • if we get a better protocol in the future we can always multi-protocol share. ( eg webdav, enlightenment/telepathy, etc.)
  • KDE has some pretty broken samba stuff kde-tools break samba at the moment for sharing samba (old and really nasty) -- KDE 4 job.

Ideas

• Why don't use Giver ? http://idea.opensuse.org/content/ideas/easy-file-sharing?s=share => It's by default on openSUSE 10.3 (Look at the flash movie)

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