Niki Kovacs wrote:
Hi,
I have to install a small network in a school in a nearby village. The network will be Linux-only, one server and fifteen desktops. Here's the idea.
Authentication should be managed centrally on the server.
User home directories should also be on the server.
Users should all have disk quotas, something like 1 GB per user.
Some shared directories should be read/write for a defined group of
users (teachers) and read-only for others.
So far, I've only dealt with local authentication. I have a little practice in basic setups of Samba and NFS and managed to get these to work OK. On the other hand, I've never worked with NIS, LDAP or the likes.
My question is more general, and I don't want to go into technical details. According to the KISS principle, which solution would you recommend (or explicitly *not* recommend)? A mix of LDAP and Samba? Or NIS and NFS? And what's this thing called Directory Server, which vaguely sounds like it's the right way to go?
Any suggestions?
You might want to look at ClearOS before tackling this yourself. It is CentOS-based but comes up with a slick web based administration program and uses LDAP for authentication out of the box. It uses openldap and I think it is integrated with samba so you could use windows clients if you wanted. On something of that scale I don't think you'd have to worry about the performance or replication differences in openldap or directory server - the administrative tools you use will be more important.