Linux: Multiple users on same machine


gdi2k

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I have a thin client environment using LTSP - basically a bunch of thin clients all log into the same Linux server via XDMCP - all apps run on the server, not on the thin clients.

The issue is that if a user starts btsync (running on the server), all other users also logged into the server can access that user's btsync web interface, including folders, secrets etc. It would be trivial to steal files in this way.

This is also a problem on any shared multi-user Linux system where multiple users can login at the same time (using Ubuntu fast user switching for example) - this is common in a family setting.

Is there a way of password protecting the Web UI or something?

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I suppose that you run btsync for each user without a specific configuration file (in fact without a specific configuration file, btsync starts with an internal default configuration.

You can specify different settings for each user by creating a configuration file for each user and there you can also specify credentials for the web interface. In addition you must make sure, that all instance specific stuff like pid file, data directory, device name and ports should be unique for each user.

The Desktop Packages for Debian and Ubuntu make a lot of work for you (including the generation of a configuration file for each user) but at the moment they are not able to handle the situation where multiple users are logged on, since they should create for each user a different port for the web interface. But I will work on this issue and present a solution in one of the next releases of the packages.

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