[Building Sakai] Mounting user home directories in Sakai

[Matthew Jones]

We talked about something like this at Michigan, but it never got beyond
the design phase. The idea there was to take the existing product
(filedrawers/mod_waklog) [1] which is a way to access afs/kerberos
protected file systems via the web, and make web hooks to it from the
Content Storage. Cosign [2] is the SSO at Michigan and handled the
credentials across all websites.  This seemed like it would be the easiest
method since it would be all http based, and it would already have the
required credentials of the student. I don't think this project would have
taken more than a month or two if there was interest, but it would be have
been very specialized to kerberos+afs+cosign.

There was also some discussion with integrating into box.net and Dropbox,
which both have open apis, but nobody outside of our group really got
interested in it on campus. (That I'd heard of) I think the permission
issue as you mentioned would be tricky since the external system certainly
won't map (and most likely all contents would have to be made either public
or duplicated in), and you couldn't give Sakai (backend) direct access to
the file system, so the users would have to go in through some web client.

Since you can store whatever you want in Google Docs, and many Universities
going the Google apps for education route, that seems like the piece that
would have the biggest future usage? Interesting ideas though.

[1]  http://www.modwaklog.org/
[2]  http://weblogin.org/

On Tue, Mar 6, 2012 at 8:53 AM, Mustansar Mehmood <mustansar at rice.edu>wrote:

>  Hi,
>      Users in many schools have been allocated personal storage space aka
> home directories to store their documents and other data. I looking into
> ways that this data be made accessible within Sakai without duplication.
> One of the key points to be kept in mind is to limit access to owners only
> and perhaps can be shared once the user(s) decide to duplicate  a certain
> piece of data in Sakai and make it available using exiting sakai permission
> system.
> Has anyone else implemented or considered this idea?
> Regards,
> Mustansar
>
> --
> Mustansar Mehmood
> Educational System Developer& Integrator
>
> Information Technology
> 6100 Main St. MS 119
> Houston Texas 77005
>
> Phone:(713)348-2523
> Fax  :(713)348 6099 email:mustansar at rice.edu
>
>
>
>
>
> I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when,you  looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.
>     -- Poul Anderson
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> sakai-dev mailing list
> sakai-dev at collab.sakaiproject.org
> http://collab.sakaiproject.org/mailman/listinfo/sakai-dev
>
> TO UNSUBSCRIBE: send email to
> sakai-dev-unsubscribe at collab.sakaiproject.org with a subject of
> "unsubscribe"
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://collab.sakaiproject.org/pipermail/sakai-dev/attachments/20120306/3651e610/attachment.html