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Jason Farmer - Allow teachers to map to their course folder

Jason Farmer - Allow teachers to map to their course folder

by Arnold Pizer -
Number of replies: 0
inactiveTopicAllow teachers to map to their course folder topic started 9/11/2002; 7:30:34 AM
last post 9/14/2002; 4:32:28 PM
userJason Farmer - Allow teachers to map to their course folder  blueArrow
9/11/2002; 7:30:34 AM (reads: 1192, responses: 3)
Hello everyone, we have a great new server running Solaris 5.8. What we are trying to do is allow our teachers to map from their Windows machines on campus to their WeBWorK course folder. This gives them access to all of their log files, as well as direct access to their problem sets, etc.

We have Samba up and running and have tried to create groups for each of the courses that exists and add the username of the teacher to that group. We then change the group of their particular course folder to that new group name. This worked out perfect. Except one problem, you can only be a member of 16 groups!

Does anyone have any other suggestions of how we can allow someone access to their course folders for WeBWorK?

Thanks! -Jason

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userArnold K. Pizer - Re: Allow teachers to map to their course folder  blueArrow
9/11/2002; 8:03:20 AM (reads: 1444, responses: 0)
Hi Jason,

The easiest solution would be set up your system to allow 32 groups. See http://access1.sun.com/technotes/01247.html

Linux by default allows 32 groups I believe. FreeBSD allows by default 16 groups, but you can build the kernal to allow more and we allow 64 in our installation.

Arnie

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userJason Farmer - Re: Allow teachers to map to their course folder  blueArrow
9/13/2002; 8:34:47 AM (reads: 1463, responses: 0)
Arnie,

We had taken that into consideration, and what seems like the best solution. However, we were planning on having more than 32 courses in the future on this server at a time. What could we do then?

Thanks,

Jason

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userMichael Gage - Re: Allow teachers to map to their course folder  blueArrow
9/14/2002; 4:32:28 PM (reads: 1444, responses: 0)
Hi Jason,

The version of WeBWorK that we have been working on this summer uses its own database to set permissions, to authorize and authenticate users and so forth. It is not yet ready for prime time, but since it does not rely on the unix permissions system it should scale better for installations where there are many groups. I expect it will be ready by next fall, probably sooner if you are in a hurry.

If the teachers are careful they can also share a unix group, but in order to prevent accidental interference of one teacher with another's course it is best to have a separate group for each teacher.

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