Linux – Where should I place group shared files on a Linux system

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I'm migrating a lot of small custom scripts and data from a Linux system to another.

On the old system we had a shared user that owned most of the files and they where located in that users /home, but on the new one we would rather login with our own accounts and use group permissions to collaborate, but as there won't be a single owner of the files, there is no /home-dir.

So where should I put those shared files? Should I create a no-login-user that owns the files? Or is there a suitable /grouphome-like place?

(I don't want to spread them out in individual users /home:s.)

Best Answer

I'd almost certainly suggest using /usr/local.

Globally accessible user scripts can be placed in /usr/local/bin. Small amounts of associated data could also go into bin. Or you may wish to separate out the data into /usr/local/var or /usr/local/share.

By doing this you'll be quite sure that anyone FHS familar will be able to locate them pretty quickly without any prior knowledge of the particular system.

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Linux – What’s the best method for creating a quota controlled shared disk space for a group of users on a Linux system

I'm a fan of "soft-quotas". Hard quota and disk limits can impair ability to work, if they happen to actually need 30 G of space one day to do some large project, let's say. At my company we have a very simple script which grabs all the users from AD, SMB mounts their home directories and does size calculation. Attached to this script is a standard quota limit (2G for us), as well as an exceptions list.

If they violate the quota they, along with management, receive an E-Mail notification of the size of their directory, as well as their quota.

Doesn't work for every environment, or every scale, but it beats impairing productivity when you have a hard quota limit.

Specify default group and permissions for new files in a certain directory

In order to have all files under a given directory inherit group rights, you need to use the setgid bit on your directory. See this link.

 $ mkdir test
 $ sudo chown raphink.staff test
 $ ls -lhd test
     drwxr-xr-x 2 raphink staff 4.0K 2009-12-21 16:19 test
 $ sudo chmod g+s test # Set the setgid bit
 $ ls -lhd test
     drwxr-sr-x 2 raphink staff 4.0K 2009-12-21 16:21 test
 $ touch test/foo
 $ ls -lh test
     total 0
     -rw-r--r-- 1 raphink staff 0 2009-12-21 16:23 foo

Best Answer

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Linux – What’s the best method for creating a quota controlled shared disk space for a group of users on a Linux system

Specify default group and permissions for new files in a certain directory

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