nautilus-share allows sharing only with login password

[John Baptist]

Binary package hint: nautilus-share

nautilus-share only allows two ways to access a given shared folder: either as a guest (with no password) or with the credentials of the owner of the folder. This is a problem. The user should be able to share a folder with an arbitrary username/password combination.

For example: imagine that at university, which is covered by a large wireless network. I wish to share notes from class with other students, so I put the notes in a shared folder and tell them the name of my computer, and a username and password to acess the folder. But which username/password? I want to ensure that only these people download the files, so I don't want to allow guest (passwordless) access, but I emphatically don't want to give out my login password to every student in class. Instead, I want a separate username/password that applies only to this shared folder, and does not correspond to a login credential on my computer (which would be a major security problem!). I should be able to do this directly from within nautilus-share, without, e.g. laboriously creating a new user on my machine for each shared folder, or dropping to a command-line to call smbpasswd.

nautilus-share should allow the user to specify any arbitrary username/password combination directly on the Sharing page, or it should allow the user to select any number of users to give access to the folder, and the list of users should come from a domain controler or LDAP server.

This applies to Karmic using nautilus-share 0.7.2-12.

[Chow Loong Jin (hyperair)]

It does sound like a good idea for a feature.
  affects ubuntu/nautilus-share
  status confirmed
  importance wishlist

--
Kind regards,
Chow Loong Jin (GPG: 0x8F02A411)
Ubuntu Contributing Developer

[erik flister (eflister)]

i can't even get access with the owner's credentials (21.10) -- should this be working? ah, explained by https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus-share/+bug/1554652