Hi,
Over the last few years, I've been using a rather bone-headed solution to implement centralized authentication and roamin user profiles in Linux-based networks: a combination of NIS and NFS.
I'm aware it's not ideal in terms of security, but it's been running in our local school since 2010, and it just works. The current setup is based on Slackware Linux on both server and desktop clients.
Here's the relevant documentation (which I wrote):
http://docs.slackware.com/howtos:network_services:roaming_profiles
BTW, the first two years this solution worked perfectly with CentOS 5.x on the server and on the desktop clients.
I'm currently migrating from Slackware to CentOS, and I'm looking for a "business-grade" replacement of this more or less obsolete configuration.
I've read about various existing solutions, and I'm not quite sure in which direction to go from here: FreeIPA? 389 Directory Server? LDAP+LAM-Manager?
Here's what I want:
1. Users should be manageable through a GUI, probably a web interface, so the client can create, manage and delete them eventually.
2. Home directories should be created/deleted automagically under the hood.
3. Every user should be able to login on any machines and find his or her files and preferences.
What can you suggest? Is there some robust and well-documented solution that works more or less out of the box and doesn't make me jump through burning loops?
I'm mainly using CentOS 7, but I'll also have to use CentOS 6.x since in our school we have some older hardware that won't run 7.x.
Cheers from the sunny South of France,
Niki Kovacs