make sure you allow file permissions.

In the Fileserver you have share permissions (coresponding to Samba users) and file permissions (coresponding to Linux users). You need to double check that the Linux & Samba users are syncronised and that the user has read/write file permissions (as well as read/write Samba (share) permissions).

I think file permissions can be edited in the Samba Webmin module too, but I've always used chmod from the CLI. The Webmin File Manager also allows file permission editing (click file/folder >> Click Info button).

but it seems it is a completely separate system.

Within Webmin on the TKL Fileserver appliance there are 3 different types of users: Webmin users (Webmin>>Webmin users), Linux users (System>>Users and Groups) and Samba users (Servers>>Samba). They are all separate user databases although they can be syncronised. Unless you want others to be able to administer the server, forget about Webmin users (they only apply to logging in to Webmin).

It seems that eXtplorer has its own user database which does not correspond to any of the other user groups so to syncronise these users you must do it manually. There may be a script or something floating about to automate it (although I couldn't find any mention of one after a brief google).

A quick glance on the eXtplorer website, seems to confirm my suspicion that eXtplorer users are specific to eXtplorer and are not Linux (or Samba) users. As far as the OS is concerned all the file operations conducted through eXplorer are actually performed by the web server (ie the user www-data). This is possibly (probably) unavoidable as common practice dictates that web servers and applications (such as eXtplorer) run under the www-data user account. The only way I can think that you could do what you are hoping for would be to have separate apache/php/eXtplorer processes running (each on a separate port) for each individual user. Each user would then only be able to log into their specific instance (using their specific port), also the eXtplorer users would still need to be set up separately. Obviously this would be completely impractical from an administrative perspective and would require a powerful server if you had many different users.

Under default setup or as long as the www-data user is also a member of the group for Samba users (often smbusers) then it shouldn't pose any usability problems. However I suspect that this could open a potential security hole if you also allow Linux users to log into the server itself. If you do that then they would have default access to all files available (to any user) under eXtplorer.

So your experiences with eXtplorer are not specifically by design but are a result of the way web servers and web services run under Linux. There is probably no workable way around this and as I said, although somewhat of an oddity to your average user is probably not going to be a concern at all.

Just to echo what you've just said, I've found the exTplorer site remarkably unhelpful and ultimately scrapped plans to build it into an appliance.

This thread is becoming very similar to this one. You might want to take a look at my comment.

but as that sort of programming is way above my pay grade I won't be too vocal in my complaints! From a brief (well actually not that brief) look over the eXtplorer (SourceForge) forums it looks like it may be a one man show. The activity seems very limited and there are fairly basic questions dating back years with no response. The news page shows that the last stable release was nearly 18mths ago with the most recent beta about 14mths ago.

@Guest:

WebMin >System>Users & Groups, it is my understanding (please correct me if I'm wrong) the addition of users/groups there are then added to the Linux user/group databases.

Yes that's correct.

And a sync of linux to samba users/groups may be required to get them to be samba users/groups. Unless the sync is automatically done by the option settings in webmin.

Yes again. I can confirm that if you set it to auto-sync (which BTW I read somewhere TKL Fileserver should do by default - but mine doesn't) it will. I tested it.

Where this is going is to me and my thinking is that extplorer should then follow the linux users (like the Syno filemanager) but as we've discussed it does not.

I agree that this would be the ideal situation.

And I would like believe the reason is in the /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf file. The entries of;
server.username = "www-data"
server.groupname = "www-data"

By my understanding this is correct.

I imagine your idea of the user being dynamically created should in theory work. I suspect the reason it didn't from your tests is because all file permissions for all files/folders would also need to be dynamically changed to this user account. Also you would need to stop the current service and then restart it under the new user. It may be possible to have a web server running under www-data that allows log in and dynamically spawns a new web server running under a different user account. How well that would work I don't know and I suspect (as with most things) the more complex it gets, the greater the chance of bugs and security issues occuring. Without a far greater knowledge of programming I just don't know whether your idea would be feasable (especially in a production environment).

And some of this may be an extplorer issue not a TurnKey issue.

Well it's definately an eXtplorer issue but as TKL consists of a conbination of individual open source projects into a complete appliance, an issues that exist in any of the individual components, then also exist in the TKL appliance. I suspect that the eXtplorer dev would not necessarily consider the current function an 'issue' as such, but your ideal functioning a 'feature request'. Perhaps you could suggest it? And/or perhaps you could contact Synology and suggest they open source their file manager :)

Jedmeister,

Finally registered as a user.

Once again thanks for the detailed response, and confirming my beliefs on how I was seeing things work.

Alon,  thanks as well and yes that thread is very similiar to my expieriences as well. It also confirms my findings, so I don't feel like I was missing something in setup and so forth.

I have to agree with you on the lack of info at the extplorer site. So I went looking at the Snyo site and will as you suggest see if indeed their file manager is open source and if not, ask if they would make it open source.

Though to that end I ran across an interesting (to me anyway) open source possible replacement, which may or may not be known to the development folks;

AjaXplorer

Current Version: AjaXplorer 2.6.1 (LGPL license)
Browser Compatibility: FF2 & 3 , IE6+, Safari, Opera, Google Chrome.

Don't know if it would work but... just my three cents.

Thanks again and I appreciate the friendliness of the folks here, it is welcome.

Dave
 

but before I pass too much judgement I'd like to actually try it out (more than the demo allows). Its definately under much heavier development than eXtplorer and has quite comprehensive documentation from a quick browse. I also note that it has a plugin system which sounds like it gives the potential to be incredibly flexible with allowance to custom integration scenarios.

Nice find!

It's not quite an eXtplorer replacement as it is to be applied to TKL LAMP (and so runs on Apache) but it should allow people to give it a proper test and compare it to eXtplorer. Get Rik's patch here and TKLPatch docs here. Any questions regarding Rik's patch would be best asked on his thread, questions regarding patching should hopefully be answered in the docs, otherwise start a new thread (and I'll see it).