VFS - Virtual File System


Introduction

VFS is a Web-based system that allows authorised users to
upload and download files. It is a file sharing utility 
aimed at communities that wish to share files across the
Internet and where traditional mechanisms aren't appropriate
or efficient.

For example, email is not suitalbe for package over about 8Mb
and FTP is not flexible on the user permissions that can be 
set. VFS tries to give users the ablity to share their files 
with exactly who they wish and to ensure that their confidential 
files remain confidential and other files are shared openly.


Requirements

1. PHP - Currently this uses PHP3 although all code should work
fine under PHP4.

2. Postgres - Currently VFS only works with Postgres. It is hoped
that mySQL will also be supported in the next release (0.2). This 
will have to be done without using blobs because of the limitations
of using mySQL.



Installation

1. Set-up the php sources to be in a directory viewable
from your web server.

2. Set-up the SQL database (currently only Postgres is supported).
See the README in the sql directory.

3. When you first log in you will be asked for an administrators
username and password. Once you have set that up you can add other
users. 

NOTE. adding a second administrator means that he can add users 
to the system and change users passwords.

4. You may have to tweak the PHP configuration a bit if you wish 
to upload large files. The size of uploads is controlled by the 
memory_limit option and the upload_max_filesize option. If your
server is configured with suitable values for these options and
you have sufficient RAM in the server it is not unreasonable to
be able to upload files over 100 Mbytes. However, personally I 
think you should try a different system if you want to share files
of that size.




Further Information

Please see the VFS web-site at:

http://vfs.sourceforge.net/

Please post comments and suggestions to our discussion forum on 
the Sorceforge project page.