How VFS Permissions Work

When a user logs in to EFT Server's HTML Listing and Upload Form or The Web Transfer Client, the files and folders that the user is allowed to access depends on the permissions assigned on the VFS tab of the Administrator interface. The VFS tab allows you to enable or disable the following permissions for a group or a user.

Inherit permissions from parent folder - When you select this for any folder in the tree, the selected folder will inherit the permissions assigned to its parent folder. For example, if you specify that folder Usr is to inherit the permissions assigned to its parent folder, then Usr has the same permissions as the Site root folder. If you clear the check box, a message appears in which you can copy the parent folder's permissions and then edit them as needed or remove all inherited permissions.

Enable Microsoft Encrypting File System for this folder - Allows you to right-click a folder in the left pane and encrypt the contents of the folder. Refer to Streaming Repository Encryption for details.

Example

Within the VFS system, the List file permission and the Show in List folder permission can confuse users as to the intended operation of the server. At first glance, it would appear that List refers to the ability to see files in the directory and Show in List would refer to the ability to see folders in the directory, but this is incorrect.

Let’s use the following folder structure as an example:

If you select user Alex and disable the Show in list permission for user Jane, then when user Jane navigates to the /Usr/ directory and retrieves a directory listing, the folder Alex will NOT appear in her directory listing. To complicate matters, however, Jane still has access to the folder and if someone tells her to manually navigate to that folder she will still be able to perform actions within the Alex folder (provided she has appropriate permissions). In this scenario, by default, when user Jane retrieves a directory listing from within the folder Alex, she will only see a list of files in the folder; she will not see any subfolders in the folder. Why? Because the subfolders, incoming, outgoing, and shared, have all inherited the disabled Show in list setting!

Summary:

 

Related Topics

Setting VFS Folder Permissions

Resetting VFS Folder Permissions