Mac OS® X Snow Leopard™ Server For Dummies®

Chapter 8. Controlling Access to Files and Folders

In This Chapter

• Working with standard POSIX permissions

• Understanding access control list permissions

• Inheriting permissions

• Looking at the rules of precedence

• Controlling access to protocols with service access control lists

If you're a strict egalitarian, you may be inclined to give everyone on the network complete access to everything on the server. This might work with a small office with a handful of users, but can be confusing to users if they have to sift through numerous server folders or if they find that someone accidentally moved a needed file.

Snow Leopard Server lets you control access by users to shared folders, files, and applications. You do this by assigning permissions, which grant users the ability to perform certain actions, such as open a folder or edit a file. Snow Leopard Server has permissions for files, folders, and applications.

You assign or change these user and group entities and permissions in Sever Admin's File Sharing pane in the Permissions tab, as shown in Figure 8-1 for reference. (Chapter 9 describes how to use Server Admin to set these permissions for shared folders.) In this chapter, I focus on describing the different types of permission schemes and their options.

Figure 8.1. Server Admin File Sharing pane.

Owner, Group, and Others (Everyone)

In file sharing, you set permissions for three user categories: ...