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by rouse

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I've been asked to help a local church with a network. I beleive they have about 25 donated machines, no wiring or budget. I want to deploy a linux smb server on the best of the lot & load rh7x or 8 on the rest workstations. There won't be an internet connection - all lan. I'd like to hear from other admins on this.

If I setup the server as a pdc & add users there, is there a way to avoid having to setup individual users at each workstation. In other words, initially the whole network may be setup in one big room, like a lab. I'd rather not have to tell them 'one and only one user to a pc', because this may end up as a classroom, with users changing several times a day.

I'm thinking about setting a root password on the server and then another root password for all the workstations.

Any advice from your experience or comments are appreciated.

Thanks - Keith

3 replies

by alveden

For what I could gather .. you are planning to have a full linux enviroment in your deployment.

In that case, you can consider using NIS (Network Information Service) together with NFS (Network file service). Definitely work better than samba in an unix enviroment. You will probably only consider samba, if you require integration with MS windows platform.

The concept of NIS is simalar to NT PDC/BDC, whereby you have NIS master server, NIS secondary server and your client is join to the NIS domain. All user account will be hosted in the master server and user authentication will be perform by either the master or secondary servers.

File sharing could be done through NFS. Depending on your configuration, users network drive could bemapped automatically to the servers. Permission can be controlled on the server side.

As for the client side, once you configure it and join the NIS domain, you can lock up the root account. User account will be serve for the NIS servers.

There you go ... u now have a Unix Lab Enviroment

by rouse

Thanks Alveden. I've not used nis or nfs on linux, but will check the man pages. This will be a pure linux deploy so I'll take your track.

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