if all the student’s are using macs, i would make a webpage with afp://your.server.domainname/user_sharepoint/username links for each homefolder – the students would click and be prompted for a password to connect – you might even be able to force ssh tunneling that way…

ftp would be the easiest cross-platform method, but NOT very secure – just make sure that no mission-critical stuff is in any student home folders.

webdave might be a little more secure, but the difficulty with webdav is that after a user authenticates, the server’s www daemon is what actually get’s at the users’s data, then hands it off to the user. this creates a lot of possible permissons trickiness.

blake/

If you set up user directories od a linux server. We are using a dedicated web hosting server running Fedora core 3. I connect to it using NX client and administer it using webmin locally. It runs a freeNX server and allows users to access a KDE desktop. Files can be uploaded and downloaded using winSCP. This ois set up with public key and private key all generated by the Linux server. No passwords are sent and all transmissions are SSH encrypted.
The Linux server also performs user authentication on top
We started with Teacher users and plan to go with students some time. The NX desktop needs reasonable internet bandwith but is amazingly fast.