[CalendarServer-users] Does Calendarserver support these features?

[Dameon Wagner]

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.