nothing to see here, move along

20 Aug 2008
It's so sad to realise that I've wasted my time the last couple of days. I've played with putting Windows XP clients in a Samba domain to have roaming profiles and the ability for users to change their passwords through a familiar (ctrl-alt-del) interface in Windows. But the people I was looking at this for, don't want any kind of filesharing ;)

Using scponly with WinSCP as an alternative for Samba has been another of those wastes of time. Not because it's a bad or unwanted idea, but because I actually wanted to deploy the chrooted version of scponly (scponlyc) instead. It turns out that setting up scponlyc becomes increasingly more and more complex as you're looking at the details. I don't mind setting up a chroot, but not with the script provided with the scponly package (since it starts adding users with useradd instead of adduser..., that's 2 undesireable things already). And I guess I can live with it that users see the entire chroot directory structure when they use scponly, although it probably is not necessary: I'm suren there's a way to hide all of those directories in files, only to make things even more complex. And then finally things went wrong went I used bindmounts and putting users into extra groups, to allow them to work on the same files together...

All in vain, such a waste of time...