Share network drive via one username/password with multiple users?

[hayduke]

I work in a heterogenous environement (Macs, Windows, Linux). The group size is about 20 people, but will slowly grow to ~30 over the next several years. I am interested in using my MacPro to share a volume to contain data and documents that are used by many of us on a regular basis and to facilitate sharing larger files.

The way I have done this before in Tiger is simply to simply provide a common username/password to all users and allow them to mount the shared partition. I'm a bit loathe to create accounts for each individual and it isn't obvious to me that this is entirely necessary for our purposes. Is this a bad idea? Is there a better/best-practices approach?

 

[FoxyKaye]

It really depends on how security-conscious you want to be. Obviously there's a simplicity built into the single password/single share model, BUT, that also means everyone sees everything on the drive, with RWX access. So, there's no space for more sensitive documents and files, and there's no accountability for folks logging in and changing files at whim, whether or not they actually should be changing those files. Yeah, users and groups are a pain, but it also helps prevent the disgruntled (or ignorant, or stupid) employee from wrecking mayhem.

Edit: Another thing that comes to mind is if you're really looking to share information internally rather than groups of files, perhaps a local wiki with the ability to attach documents would be more helpful?

 

[hayduke]

Thanks for the input. The wiki idea is an interesting one, but the data files can be quite large and I want people to have command-line access to files. If the data is truly "shared" data then RWX access doesn't worry me to much. I can make them non-admin and chmod particular files that really should be read-only. Aside from users being able to keep some information/data private while other data is shared I can't think of an advantage of doing things this way. Everyone has their own computer so they can keep their private information on that machine. We simply need a shared drive for communal projects. I'll probably go with the single user approach.

Anyone else have thoughts about this?