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I have an Ubuntu file server (samba) sharing a folder structure with a Windows 7 computer classroom. All users use the same user/pass to access the folders and have read/write permissions.
I would like to prevent users from moving or deleting folders, but keep the file permissions. In other words, I would like to protect my folder structure, but allow users to add/delete/rename/move files within that structure.
How can I do that?
If you only have one level of directories, it should be possible. The key is that creating/removing files depends on the write-ability of the directory those files are in. So imagine this structure:
/srv/ root:files drwxr-x---
/srv/userfiles/ root:files drwxrwx---
(files is the group of the user that accesses the system) In this case users can see the contents of /srv, but they can't move/remove userfiles/. They can create/modify/remove anything in userfiles/. This method breaks down if you need a tree directories more than one layer deep that can't be moved.
There's no pushbutton for this, but it's not hard to script, set up an inotifywait monitor and undo any unwanted changes.
The payload command is
inotifywait -mr -e move -e create -e delete -e attrib \
--format '%e %w%f/' /srv/userfiles
to see everything done to the structure, it'll print lines like
CREATE,ISDIR /srv/userfiles/haha/
and you pipe the output through a scanner for the stuff that needs to get undone.
