Amahi, Samba, Greyhole, ownCloud, etc. users and directories

[neilvenn]

I've been using my own installs of Greyhole and Samba on Ubuntu for some time now but I've had trouble trying to get Samba to play nice with my new Windows 8 laptops. I wanted a solution which was more like DropBox and discovered ownCloud which somehow led be to Amahi. I like the idea that Amahi gives me a more integrated experience and I'm hoping will enable me to access my files (using the various apps) from where-ever I may be.

There are four "Windows" users in the household - we already each have a Samba share / Greyhole LZ for each user and thus a bunch of files and folders in Greyhole storage. I'd like user files to remain owned by that user if possible - but we could work around this by only accessing our own share. We also have a number of other Samba shares with shared files (e.g. music and photos) that we all want read-write access to. On my previous install I created a Samba user for each of us and controlled access to the different shares.

But having installed AjaXplorer, ownCloud, Greyhole and Webmin on top of Amahi I now have a bunch of different app users. I'm expecting to get even more when I look into Plex, etc. I know I can set the admin user for each to have the same username and password and create the same set of usernames with the same passwords but is there a way to just integrate with the Linux or Samba user authentication / authorisation service?

And I'd appreciate some advice for how to set up user directories and shares. What I'd like to do is make the existing user files and folders available through ownCloud. But ownCloud seems to have it's own file system space. How can I expose what is already on the server via ownCloud? And have new files and folders created on the PCs, and sync'd through the ownCloud app, land in my Greyhole Landing Zones for processing?

What would be ideal would be a general description of how to manage users, user directories, shared directories and user authorisation in an Amahi system to avoid duplication (in app config) and be included in the Greyhole storage process.

Thanks in advance.
Neil

[bigfoot65]

I know I can set the admin user for each to have the same username and password and create the same set of usernames with the same passwords but is there a way to just integrate with the Linux or Samba user authentication / authorisation service?

Currently, not this is not possible unless you have the skills to modify the apps to do so. It is a feature suggestion for future versions of Amahi. Not sure when or if it would be integrated as this is quite complicated. Most apps require the user to be created on install, but typically don't allow for multiple users. That part often has to be done manually in the app, using the initial user as the administrator.

Recommend you check out the wiki guidance for ownCloud. I believe there is guidance there to help answer some of your questions.

ownCloud

The wiki has lots of useful information and is easily searchable.