OSS Web-based File Management?

breadiu asks: "I work for a department at a university, and we'd love to offer students some type of web-accessible file storage, but, like most educational institutions, money is tight. There are some great closed source solutions out there like Xythos' Digital Locker Suite, but those cost. I've had trouble finding a really well put together open source solution. I've taken a look at Slide and even Zope, but neither really match up to Xythos' offerings. What have others done to provide centralized file storage/management? Is there anything OSS that offers WebDAV, Apache support, BSD/Linux support and Active Directory-LDAP authentication with support for Windows and Mac clients?"

Comments

Re:Easy...

[chipster]

"I programmed one in PHP for my own website..."

Neat.

"How hard could it be?"

Umm..."hard" for someone who doesn't know how to script/program perhaps?

"I mean, it's even completely opensource!"

I perused your website, and found no code anywhere. Maybe you are referring to the PHP engine/interpreter itself as "opensource" (sic)?

Please help us out here and tell us what value your comment offers.

Answered own question

[DrZaius]

Maybe I don't understand the problem:

Is there anything OSS that offers WebDAV, Apache support, BSD/Linux support and Active Directory-LDAP authentication with support for Windows and Mac clients?

Doesn't Apache + mod_webdav + auth_ldap support all of this? Can't you just point any webdav client at apache and have web based file storage?

If you want normal people to access it, put up a web page with instructions on how to access it.

Re:Answered own question

[rhizome]

Doesn't Apache + mod_webdav + auth_ldap support all of this?

Yes it does. This is a stupid article.

Re:Answered own question

[masukomi]

You have to install and configure an ldap server (know how to administer it), recompile apache, and know what the hell mod_webdav (or even webdav) is in the first place.

How many non programmer people do YOU know who can do that?

So NO, it isn't a stupid article. But your response is a great example of one of the underlying problems in the OSS community: developers tend to forget that the rest of the world isn't made up of developers.

Re:Answered own question

[mborland]

I would like to complain about the previous complaint.

I agree that the guy that said 'stupid article' was a little blunt, but I think it's fair for readers of Ask Slashdot to complain when topics are at the level of 'how do I tie my own shoe?' I have no problem with someone asking for help--there are no stupid questions--but this doesn't seem like the forum for this kind of question (front page, etc.).

I didn't get your point about technical complexity. The sysadmin/programmer's job is to understand these technologies (they listed WebDAV, & Apache in the posting after all), and the end users in this case hardly need to know anything (they just map drives or whatever, same as any other solution).

Re:Answered own question

[soward]

not really. Apache+mod_webdav does generally provide that functionality, but not on a per-user basis. Say you've got a school with 20,000 students. To make Apache+mod_dav work you'd need 20,000 entries in the httpd.conf. Plus it all will still run as your www user, so folx couldn't access these files through any method other than WebDAV and keep things like permissions intact.

WebDAV is nifty in that there are client implementations built-in to most common OSes. It's also nice because it runs through most firewalls since it's built on top of HTTP. It's not so great at some things, though...speed can be an issue, resource usage on the server another, metadata concerns come up occasionally.

Hence a nice solution would allow WebDAV access when appropriate, and other types (e.g. SMB, AFP, NFS, local, etc) when needed.

So I don't think it's a stupid question at all -- just not asked very clearly.

We are working on a custom DAV service to accomodate this sort of usage currently, so if there is a way to use mod_dav, have it query an ldap server to log a user in, and have it read and write files to the local filesystem as that particular uid (under unix), and do so with a single config file entry for all users, please post a link to it!

Write Your Own

[Comatose51]

Don't want to sound like one of those guys who always go, "If you don't like it, change it." but you're in a good position to do that because of the academic setting. Make it a project for Comp Sci students or grad. students. It'll be good practice for them in managing real world projects and an good intro to open source development/philosophy. OSS seems in line with the open philosophy of academia. Find a project that does almost what you want and extend it.

Re:Not so hard

[pizen]

You've obviously never worked at a University.

Quite the opposite, actually. If you provide a service and say "we provide a service that allows you to do and here's a link to a tutorial we wrote teaching you how to use it" the students who want to use the service will read the tutorial and learn. The others won't probably because they don't think it's a better solution that what they had been doing (floppies, cd, or emailing to themselves).

Even if it's the most intuitive, user-friendly system in the world there are still people who will need instructions so there's no need to dumb things down to try to eliminate that group. (I guess this is why I never liked HCI classes)

Re:priorities

[Danger Stevens]

It's barbaric when it happens in London, but when it happens constantly in Israel you don't even blink.

Bombs in London are barbaric but rape victims having no legal protection in Saudi Arabia doesn't bother you.

There's a Genocide happening in Sudan - what have you done to stop it?

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