Hi, I don't have a answer, it's more kind of a question/suggestion..

I've got a quite similar problem:
Integration of user permissions into samba, email server, database, and a mod_perl webinterface.

So I'd like to describe what I'm most possibly going to do/already have done:
The webinterface/authentication mechanism was the first task, is already finished and uses postgresql as backend.
Because users are managed from within the webinterface and the permissions structure is quite complex, I'll stay with this.
Writing an apache handler for authentication was quite simple and didn't take long.
If someone is interested I can post the code here.

After this there was the need to integrate the users´ fax numbers and emails into a device which is able to scan, fax and send emails.
The device has a ldap interface, so I wrote a ldapserver with Net::LDAP::Server which accesses the postgresql database.

Getting the server to work has also been a matter of one day.

Now I still have to integrate the users into samba and the emailserver.
There are already ldap backends for emailservers, so I'm most possibly going to adapt my own ldap server.

Samba has also a ldap backend, but I'm thinking about writing a fuse fs for the quite sophisticated permissions of file access/preventing the users from editing files at the same time.

I believe ldap has some advantages: It's mature, spreaded widely, and very many programs can access ldap servers already.

That's however just a suggestion, you might wan't to google for ldap yourself.

And I'm really interested in how you solve this task/What others think about the ldap approach.

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