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Re: [LUG] School file servers

 

On Thu, 28 Oct 2010, Kai Hendry wrote:

Hi guys,

Does anyone have experience with deploying some sort of file share for
a school? Preferably a UK based 3rd party offers this service, like
"dropbox" or something like that.

Why would a school want to store documents off-site in the first place? (Although reading below it looks like it's a case of "get a man in to do it for you" sort of thing as they've no in-house experience) or does the school do mostly distance type learning, so wants documents on an external and (presumably) faster host?

I'm not up on stuff like dropbox really - I know how it works, but is it the best thing?

Dropbox employs a client that runs on you PC to make the access a bit easier than FTP though. That would be the "killer app" in this instance, I guess. (Although management is more of an issue in a muti-user environment)

I curently have one company using FTP to store/archive their work - that seems to work OK for them (They're a mix of Mac and PC people) ... Setting up a server to use sftp isn't hard - management a bit trickier but there are plenty of front-ends out there.

I guess you could run elgg ;-)

I'd be hesitant to run a hosted Samba service - I'm sure it should be as secure as the username/passwords are, but ... It's just far too easy to do stupid things with interfaces like that remoetly - e.g. copy huge folders of data from one location to another which is going to completely saturate the end-users line for however long it takes... Mind you, FTP as a "network place" in Windows explorer isn't any different...

FWIW: I currently hold some data/email/website for some young people in my capacity as a volunteer youth worker for DCC and am eCRB checked, but I'm still not convinced a school ought to store data off-site... But if you can think of a solution or method for them to use and know how much data they're looking at, I might be interested.. Virtual server with a fixed amount of disk space running ... something... ?

(Is there a free version of dropbox - on both the client and server side?)

Gordon







Kind regards,


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Aman
Date: 28 October 2010 15:51
Subject: Re: From ACCD (Edgware Road)
To: Kai Hendry <hendry@xxxxxx>


hi kai,

The reason he did not like it is that, the third party might not be
located in UK and also they need to satisfy all the criteria (like the
staff of the third party must have CRB and so on. ), which will
complicate things further ....

The services of the server are:-
-Store a password protected folders for staff and students (i.e the
student will have their own password protected folders and also access
to study or corse materials)
-and basically manage and administer the network

it is not that complicated network really. What  ACCD is look for is
to just have a secure server to do the above services.

as in regards to the ac.uk domain name, i only joined the organisation
recently, but the reason they have the org.uk is that they also
operate as a charity, so perhaps that is the reason ACCD has the ac.uk


 Kind Regards

Aman Gebreamlak

On 28 October 2010 15:02, Kai Hendry <hendry@xxxxxx> wrote:

Hmm, that is really unfortunate you can't use a third party. Is it
because they were not located in the UK?


I really don't recommend running your own server. It's too hard,
especially if you have no experience of Linux.


What are the services you must provide?

* Email
* File server
* Anything else?

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