Home Directories on Moodle

[apeo]

Has anyone setup Moodle so that the kids can have access to their home directories?

Just for information, we run Apache2.2 on Windows 2003.

[Rammie]

I'm looking for the same solution. Moodle already has facilities for upload and download; has anyone got any ideas on how to point these processes at home directories? We have ASP.net available, so impersonation code would be an option and simplifies addressing UNC, though I've never tried to link psp and asp together (yet).

Or maybe a more open question: has anybody got any sort of open-source remote-access solution working, to provide authenticated access to home directories? Doesn't seem like a major problem, surely?

[Geoff]

IIS with WebDav running on your fileserver is the 'simplest' way.

However you can do it with Apache, auth_pam and Webdav, you will need to configure Samba+Winbind+pam_winbind too. Also you'll probably need to use pam_mount so that the connect the users home dir to the Linux server when they login (as it's going to be remote storage, be it a SAN, a Windows Fileserver or a NAS box).

[CyberNerd]

I recall that moodle are working on getting a JSR-170 repository API together so that it could link in with Alfresco - IMO this is a really cool solution as Alfresco has tonnes of really useful features for homedrives. If the moodle/homedir can be done another way I'd be interested too.

other methods are things like http://smbwebclient.sourceforge.net/
(anyone tried this?)
or davenport http://davenport.sourceforge.net/

[Rammie]

Thanks, some good ideas to consider. Actually, our remote gateway box is W2003S, not Linux, because we anticipated that it would ease connectivity issues internally. Does that make it a WIMP box? (Windows IIS MySQL PHP). We've got a couple of Linux boxes running Squid, but only one of our team has serious Linux experience.