Thanks. Your advice makes sense, but allow me to give a bit more detail of the current setup.
1. Those users for whom I do have an account set up (example: gagan) have their own username/password. 2. FTP and Telnet has been disabled, so SSH is the only way they can access our US server currently. 3. Those users, ie. gagan, that have a username/password, are currently placed into the groups for which they have access (ie. marketing) and that particular directory is owned by root with file group set to itself (ie. marketing). 4. Each directory is set to 770, with owner/group having r/w/x bit set. Now, you wrote: 3. For the files and directories you want these folks to have write access to, make them mode 664 or 774 as appropriate, chgrp them to india, and let them rely on group- rather than user-level access. Set these users' umasks so files they upload have appropriate permissions. 1. Based on this setup, would I still chgrp the directories to India? 2. I am not sure how to set umasks, but once I figure that out, I would then set it directly on the user? The question seems to have mutated; I appreciate your explanation of SSH as a method by which to transmit securely over an insecure medium rather than offering any true security of the machine itself. In rethinking this strategy, I think assigning each user his/her own secure password needs to be the norm, and when users ssh into the system they will just have to navigate to the shared directory on their own. Any other suggestions are appreciated. Thanks, Eve - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-newbie" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.linux-learn.org/faqs