On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 4:16 AM, Dr Andrew C Aitchison
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> On Thu, 6 Dec 2012, Andrew Z wrote:
>
>> Short answer - switch to drop box.
>
>
> Has it improved in SL6 ?
>
> The last time I looked at drop box rpms was under SL5
> and they were a security nightname (running daemons, changing
> user files on installation, ...) that I decided that they
> were going nowhere near my multiuser, multi-machine network.

Heh. It's an ongoing problem, complicated by various people's
requirements and alot of unwritten specifications. For universal,
secure access, I spent a lot of time years ago replacing an FTP site
with WebDAV over HTTPS, for which there are good Java clients and
built-in access with various browsers (such as Konqueror for Linux)
and built right into the Network Neighborhood of Windows. (Didn't get
to try MacOS clients except for the Java client.)

This is the fundamental technology for web access to Subversion (with
which I've done a *lot* of work), and it supports all the access
control features and subtleties of web servers in a very workaable
way. And by running on HTTPS, people tend not to block it at the
firewalls. It's not quite accessible enough to mount and run "make" on
to build your software, but it solved a *lot* of security requirements
for us at the time.

Note that I would *not* crosshook this approach to a backend
Subversion system for souce control management, if you care about
security. The Subversion command line clients *still* store your
passwords in clear text on Linux and UNIX systems.