File sharing server across campuses

Question

Hi I am looking into setting up file sharing between college campuses for sports videos. However, instead of setting file permission levels that stay pretty constant, users will constantly be uploading new research and determining which users can access the files. So a user from campus A would upload a file and allow access to user B, but not user C. The next file may be allowed to be shared to user C but not B. These permissions will be changing on a regular basis--what would be the best way to manage this to allow users to manage who can access their specific content?
Crudely I was thinking this could be managed by creating a folder/drop box for each user and then the other users could all submit content to the individual drop boxes. However, my problem with this is that especially for video content this will create a lot of copies of the same files and thus take up unnecessary space. There should be a more efficient way to do this in my thinking. Thoughts?

Answer 1

I'm guessing you're thinking of setting up a youtube-ish service for multiple sites and multiple clients here, and, well, start thinking of the access control permutations when you hit ten or a hundred or a thousand clients, and start thinking about what sorts of network bandwidth you'll need to stream all that video. Hundreds and thousands of clients and tens of sites work rather differently than a dozen users in the same room with gigabit pipes. You should be designing your web-facing interfaces and your database and your data distribution models, and not thinking about individual files and directories.
You're basically going to be setting up your own access control and distribution model here, and once the clients are authenticated to the database, geographically local copies of the videos are then streamed to the clients. If there's any particular likelihood of scaling here, you should probably be looking at, for instance, hadoop or voldemort, or other choices.
Then there are discussions around whether you're going to be doing transcoding (probably yes), and the computes needed to run that.
You've got a learning curve ahead of you. Consider bringing in some help, if you can't find an existing package that gets you close to where you're going.
If, on the other hand, you're just doing something small, then I might look to use something akin to Drupal to control access to the files and to manage the general front-end "fun" that a web site has, though I don't know if there's a connection from that over to the Quicktime Streaming Server, or however you're storing video. That might require some custom coding.