On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 10:20:43AM +0200, Martin Bretschneider scribbled in "[CalendarServer-users] Does Calendarserver support these features?":

Hi,

I am a long time Debian Linux user and found out about the calendarserver from darwin. I installed it on Debian Lenny but have some questions since I could not find appropriate docs for the configuration files (there are only the comments):

1. Can Calendarserver accept username/password combinations directy from the system users (/etc/passwd, /etc/shadow) without the use of the accounts.xml or kerberos backend? It is possible to use the system user names as email-addresses (I guess that this is for notification)?

2. If yes, it is also possible to reuse the group information from the system (/etc/groups) as permissions for calendars? I do not want to edit accounts.xml each time a new user is added or removed.

3. How do I create a calendar that can be used by several persons at the same time (random read and write access)? What URL do I have to enter in the caldav-clients? Or do I have to create it on the server first?

Hi Martin, I'm also a Debian user, and although I've been aware of calendar server for over a year now (revisiting every couple of months to see how it's going), I only noticed a couple of days ago that it was in the Lenny repository. Basically I've only been using it a couple of days, so I also have plenty of questions. However, I can answer your third question: Without reference to questions 1 and 2, and where you get your user principles from, you can have shared calendars using "group" principles in calendarserver. Using, and slightly extending, the simple accounts.xml style setup that I dug out of an older SVN checkout (although I later found the same files in /usr/share/doc/calendarserver/examples/), I created a shared group calendar and accessed it in Sunbird using an URL like: http://<my-test-server>:8008/calendars/groups/users/calendar And it works nicely -- all the extra test users I created (imaginatively called test2 through to test9) can access, add, and edit events in the calendar. I haven't yet figured out how to give only read access to some users, and write access to others, but I've only installed calendarserver yesterday morning, and it's been quite a steep learning curve so far, so I haven't really got a good handle on how it all fits together. Now I'll go back to trying to figure out how the ACLs work, and lurking on this list to see if someone answers your first two questions... Cheers. Dameon.

On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 10:20:43AM +0200, Martin Bretschneider wrote:

1. Can Calendarserver accept username/password combinations directy from the system users (/etc/passwd, /etc/shadow) without the use of the accounts.xml or kerberos backend? It is possible to use the system user names as email-addresses (I guess that this is for notification)? Debian ships a patch that allows you to user /etc/passwd for users and /etc/group for group based calendars. It's also in trac: http://trac.calendarserver.org/ticket/271 The top of the patch has some info about the setup. At the moment you have to use kerberos since I didn't get around to implement SASL yet. Cheers, -- Guido