Users, groups and folders

Setting up users and groups

In the login menu interested persons may apply to become users of the course. The application details are sent to the course administrator's e-mail address. In that mail a link to a half-automatic installation of a user is provided. Clicking unto that link brings the course admin to the user installation page in the admin area.

The explicit way is to change explicitly to the admin area (remember: extra "admin/" at the end of the course URL). From the admin area you may install users and groups. You may give each user a homefolder or you may give all users of a group the same group home folder to share. You may also have an index file added to the group's or user's homefolders (see below the discussion of the Filedepot)..

In case you want to encourage project-oriented, collaborative learning you should arrange student groups of 3-5 members. Then, before "creating" these users, it is advisable to proceed as follows:

1. In the admin Filedepot-View create groupfolders (e.g. group1, group2 etc.).
2. In the group administration page created the groups (without members)
3. When creating the users, assign them to their corresponding groups and give them the group folder as home folder (which therefore will be shared by all group members).
4. Only for the first member of each group activate the "add index" boxes, this will then create an index.html which will be referred to by a link in an automatically generated file "User contributions".

Do not worry, if you missed that procedure. Everything can also be correctly adjusted by individual changes through various admin menus. This was just a "streamlined" version.

Forum

The course administrator as well as every user of the course may create new topics threads to the forum. Each topic then may have comments opening subtopic threads and so one, down to 10 levels. Only the course admin may delete topics entries. In that case also the comments and subcomments to that thread are deleted. The course administrator usually will therefore provide a few main threads and suggest to the users to work below that level.

Userspace: Filedepot

The Filedepot rootfolder may be accessed only by the course administrator through the link in the admin area

The group folders may be created by the course administrator, who also defines the group members. During the installation of new users they may be joined to existing groups. They also may become joint owners of group folders. Alternatively they may get individual home folders.

Users may work only in folders, which are their home or which have been created by them. Thus, in case of a joint home for several members of a group, these have access to all files in their joint home but only individual access to the subfolders created by the individual user.

During user installation (or by updating user information) the course administrator may copy template files to files "index.html" in the group- or user-folders. The template file itself is modules/filedepot/template-index-in-userfolder.html. These index files are automatically linked to in a general Filedepot "User contributions" file. This allows users or groups to publish some of their private files for other users: They just link to them in their index files.

Ownership and permissions are organized as follows:

• Users' homefolders are defined by the course administrator and cannot be deleted, copied, moved, zipped, or tared by the users, even if they are owners.
• Folders can have one ore more owners.
• The files within a folder  belong to all owner(s) of the folder; the folders belong to the respective creator, unless the ownership is changed by the course administrator.
• Only owners of files and folders have access (read, copy, move, write, delete) to those.
• Subfolders within a folder may have individual owners, if created by them. In this case other owners of the parent folder cannot access the subfolder (and cannot delete it).
• When creating folder hierarchies (folder and subfolders etc.) with copy, untar or unzip then the ownership of the creator is inherited.
• When a folder is moved, all ownerships of subfolders are unchanged.
• Files with extensions like php or php4 cannot be created (for security reasons, see the section on security).
  

The Filedepot is owned by the course administrator who has access to all folders and files in it through the Filedepot feature in the administration area. If the administrator tries to create files outside the Filedepot these will be created in the Filedepot rootfolder. (See also the remarks in the section on security.)

Backup

It is useful and advisable to keep backup copies of files in userspace/Filedepot and of your lecture material in the folder contents. For contents just save a tar-archive copy with, e.g., the command

 tar czf contents.tgz contents

in the course home and move the resulting backup-copy contents.tgz to a save place. However, this way is not possible for the folder userspace/Filedepot.

Since userspace/Filedepot belongs to the web server, it will not be included in a tar-archive of your course, but you will get an error message in such an attempt. There are two methods to deal with that

• (a) You have root privileges on the webserver; than you can create the archive as usual.
• (b) You do not have root privileges, but are the course administrator. Then, using the filedepot-page (from the admin-area), you can tar and zip the relevant group folders (choose "tar and zip ") with all their contents and copy it via "download " (mouse menu) to another appropriate place under your control.

Export of user data

In the "List of users" window you may export all user data with help of the "Produce a data file for exporting to other programs" link at the bottom. Activating this produces a page with instructions, how to proceed.

Alternatively, on the webserver you may use the utility mysqldump databasename users (cf. the man pages).