[PLUG] Linux web server user setup

["Aaron Crosman" <ACrosman@afsc.org>]

I am in the process of setting up our first non-windows web server.
It's a dedicated Debian server hosted by a 3rd party, and for the most
part everything is going along better then expected (something is bound
to come up soon!).

The problem I have is that I'm having trouble deciding how best to
configure users and the server for the shared environment.  Under
Windows that was about the only thing that I like; it was easy to
control which users could edit which parts of the site.  I'm concerned
about finding the right solution for Linux, and I'm looking for
suggestions or articles that discuss this.  The articles I found so far
all assume that if someone creates a file that either A) no one else
will be editing that file, and/or B) they know how edit the permissions
to let others edit it.  Neither of those assumptions apply to us (the
web editors would like to know as little as possible about how the
permissions work, and never want to have to change them).

I'd like users to be able to update new files so that anyone else on the
web team could edit that file.  On our test server I set the umask to
002, but our hosts are telling me that's a bad idea by default.  I can't
expect users to remember to update each file they update so it has group
edit rights (it would quickly become a nightmare).

Additionally, when I am running several sites on the server in the
future, how do I control who has access to which sites, without having
major problems with groups being wrong when new files are created.

Sorry this email got longer then I'd hoped.  Hopefully it's still clear.
Thanks for any help you can offer!
Aaron


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