Filemanager, WebDAV and Unix home directories

[RichH]

I need some help with FileManager and getting it to work correctly with existing Unix home directories.

We run eGroupWare on RHEL4 and Apache2. We are authenticating against our OpenLDAP database and everything is great - Mail, iCalSrv etc. all working fine - what we’d really like to do is provide a kind of “web-drive” for users to browse/download/upload files in their EXISTING Unix homedirs.

All respective homedirs reside at /home/username on the server, so here is where the problems are encountered.

I have managed to get a WebDAV server up and running by setting up a virtualhost in Apache that when contacted (and appending the username eg: http://webdisk.company.com/username) allows users to browse files etc.

However, in order to do this, we have had to give Apache read perms to /home/, so the permissions are root:apache (750) for /home/

We then put individual .htaccess files in each homedir with LDAP authenticate info inside to allow only registered users to access their own DAV folder…

I can’t get this to integrate with FileManager whatsoever. I think that this is down to the fact that FileManager expects a /home folder in the root of whatever is fed into “Enter the full path for users and group files.” in the Setup pages - in our case for example is “http://webdisk.company.com”

Can anyone offer a solution to get FileManager to be able to use our current Unix home dirs? We don’t want to create seperate storage space especially for this (although I’ve tried this and it works) - they MUST be able to access the same Unix home dirs they can when in the office…

[jneves]

I did it with a VERY DIRTY TRICK (you’ve been warned). This has some
security issues.

Samba exports the home directories.

I then use smbmount with autofs (automount) to mount the samba shares
with uid=www-data and gid=www-data. Filemanager works over the directory
where the smbmounts are done.

It works mostly (files deleted on the filesystem do not reflect in the
filemanager).

Best regards,
João Miguel Neves

Qui, 2007-03-01 às 08:33 -0800, RichH escreveu:

[jbakshi12]

RichH wrote:

I need some help with FileManager and getting it to work correctly with
existing Unix home directories.

I am also looking for the same. The problem I am facing that it needs a
huge time to add the directories and files using filemanager.
Realy needs a huge time. I like to just copy the files and directories
off the home contents of the user into the home of egw user. filemanager
and webdrive actually search here. But it doesn’t work. egw demands
adding files and folder through filemanager and the process modified
the entries in Mysql. Is there any script or modification which will do
the same on manually copied directories and files ?
thanks

We run eGroupWare on RHEL4 and Apache2. We are authenticating against our
OpenLDAP database and everything is great - Mail, iCalSrv etc. all working
fine - what we’d really like to do is provide a kind of “web-drive” for
users to browse/download/upload files in their EXISTING Unix homedirs.

All respective homedirs reside at /home/username on the server, so here is
where the problems are encountered.

I have managed to get a WebDAV server up and running by setting up a
virtualhost in Apache that when contacted (and appending the username eg:
http://webdisk.company.com/username) allows users to browse files etc.

However, in order to do this, we have had to give Apache read perms to
/home/, so the permissions are root:apache (750) for /home/

We then put individual .htaccess files in each homedir with LDAP
authenticate info inside to allow only registered users to access their own
DAV folder…

I can’t get this to integrate with FileManager whatsoever. I think that this
is down to the fact that FileManager expects a /home folder in the root of
whatever is fed into “Enter the full path for users and group files.” in the
Setup pages - in our case for example is “http://webdisk.company.com”

Can anyone offer a solution to get FileManager to be able to use our current
Unix home dirs? We don’t want to create seperate storage space especially
for this (although I’ve tried this and it works) - they MUST be able to
access the same Unix home dirs they can when in the office…

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[RichH]

Can anyone (a developer?) offer any more help on my issue. I don’t want to go down the route suggested by jneves since it presents too many security implications IMO…

[jneves]

I agree with you, but I don’t think there’s a safe way around other than
reimplementing filemanager with a back-end managed by a root user
process.

eGroupWare runs as www-data (or whatever the user running the webserver
is). That happens as a security measure to contain the web server. Now,
what you want is to work around that.

Only the superuser (or Administrator, or anything similar) can both
access any user’s file and create a file with another owner in the
filesystem. Both of these are requirements for filemanager to work.

So, removing the containment measure is the only way. It’s a risk
increase, but it is manageable. Of course I wouldn’t advise for
installations where there isn’t an active support system (active
sysadmin or support contract), but with the current codebase, no other
solution will appear.

Best regards,
João Miguel Neves

Qui, 2007-03-08 às 08:12 -0800, RichH escreveu:

[RichH]

For remote access we currently use Openwebmail - which is written in Perl and includes a Webdisk function that is superb. However, we want to migrate e-mail and calendaring over to eGroupWare - but we would need this webdisk function also.

The Webdisk function in Openwebmail uses suidexec with Perl to accomplish access to user’s existing homedirs, and is fine and secure enough, if only eGroupWare had something similar…