On 05/25/12 16:12, Frank Bonnet wrote:
[big snip]
Well ... in short I need to let our users ( students + profs ) access
and share their data ( living in their UNIX home directories )
The access must be easy and possible from as much devices as possible.
Am I clear enough ? ( sorry English is not my native language ...)
That's fine. OK, so you're after basic file system visibility
everywhere. You should look at Mehmet Erol Sanliturk's reply as well, he
gives useful links.
As he said in his post, NFS is the first place to start. It's available
on FreeBSD, Linux, Mac OS, other Unix derived systems, and Windows 7.
The one thing to be careful of is that it works best when you have all
home directories on central servers and all access is on client
machines. It is possible to cross mount NFS that machines act as both
servers and clients but it has many problems and one server crashing can
cause everything to lock up. (Been there, done that, cursed repeatedly.)
For earlier (< 7) Windows boxes, one possibility is running Samba on the
Unix servers. This would seem most natural to a Windows user as they
merely have to browse the network to find the shared file systems.
However, another possibility is running a WebDAV server that makes the
home directories visible. Windows (>= XP) can connect drive letters to
WebDAV servers, and there are also Android and iPhone apps that can
access WebDAV. This would let smartphone and tablet users get to the
shared data, if that's useful. Please note that I use Android but not
iOS, so any IOS suggestions are from a quick Google search, not
experience. It also seems that you have to pay for the relevant iOS
apps. Maybe an iPhone/iPad user can improve on this?
I hope this is of some help.
Possibly useful links:
The handbook chapter on network servers. This covers NFS, Samba and
Apache which can be used for WebDAV.
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/book.html#NETWORK-SERVERS
Wikipedia on WebDAV. This links onwards to all sorts of related resources.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebDAV
An Android app that can access WebDAV (and much more besides). This is
one I use, but please note that I haven't used it specifically for
WebDAV. You may be able to find others but this is well rated. It's got
free and paid for versions.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=xcxin.filexpert
A (paid for) iPhone WebDAV app. Apparently iWork for iOS can also handle
WebDAV, but I know nothing about it or its suitability.
http://greenbytes.de/dav-e.html
_______________________________________________
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
