Re: [SAGE] incoming file transfers, and collaborative environmentsin general

[nmedbery@museverte.net]

Betsy,

If you are able or willing to spend some money, there are a number of file
transfer solutions out there that incorporate strong authentication and
varying levels of back-end integration.  These tend to focus on *secure* 
transfers and have the option (or requirement) of public/private keys.

One such application that I have a small amount of experience with is
Valicert SecureTransport (oh wait, now it's Tumbleweed).  This is actually
based on a number of open source projects (OpenSSH, OpenLDAP, ProFTPD I
think), plus the company's glue code and web administration tools.

http://www.tumbleweed.com/products/securetransport_form.html

At my last job, I was involved with getting that up and running so that it
would authenticate against an existing LDAP account store (Novell
eDirectory, but you could use almost anything).  It was a reasonably
impressive product, though required some hacking in a few areas to make it
do what we needed.  The project leader ended up writing quite a bit of
Perl glue code to make the authentication and groups work to our liking.  
That flexibility is nice, though the developers were not always willing to
change some things for us that seemed pretty basic.

I have also used Syntrex BDE.

http://www.syntrex.com/products/BDE.shtml

This was a decent product, though a little rougher around the edges.  The 
company was also in trouble in '02, closing it's US office.  Development 
was based out of Italy.  I am really not sure what's going on with them 
now.

These may be overkill or more complicated than you would like, but I 
figured I would throw them out there.
	-Nate

On Tue, 4 Jan 2005, Betsy Schwartz wrote:

> A specific problem: I've been asked to think about ways to allow "friends 
> of friends" to upload files to our servers. Obviously we don't want to 
> enable anonymous incoming FTP or anything like that  - nor do we want to be 
> creating accounts for these users. I think ideally we'd use our existing 
> authentication system to give a user a "ticket" they could give to the 
> sender. Are there any existing systems that allow something like this?
> 
> In general"  what are interesting sites or books to learn about 
> collaborative environments? I know about  WebDav and wikis, but beyond that 
> I'm finding a bewildering variety of information (and much hype). I need to 
> become a Subject Matter Expert in this and I'm not quite sure where to 
> start. Our users are architects, landscape architects, urban planners, and 
> other sorts of designers, with a few random Pure Design and Industrial 
> Design and other such folks in the mix.  In general they are interested in 
> collaborating on web sites and exchanging Very Large image files, not so 
> much in fancy interactive whiteboards etc (although it would be good to 
> learn more about all that too...)
> 
> thanks for any pointers
> Betsy
> 
> PS for the file transfer, this looks good, but I suspect it's proprietary. 
> I'm waiting to hear back:
> http://www-db.embl.de/jss/servlet/de.embl.bk.wwwTools.TicketFileStore
> 
> Betsy Schwartz                                                    email: 
> betsys@gsd.harvard.edu
> Unix Systems Administrator,CRG                           voice: 617-495-5947
> Harvard Graduate School of Design                         fax:    617-496-5866
> 
> 
> 
>