[CentOS] Simple solution for small network in a school ?

Sat Jul 10 15:55:32 UTC 2010
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

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.
> 
> 1) Authentication should be managed centrally on the server.
> 
> 2) User home directories should also be on the server.
> 
> 3) Users should all have disk quotas, something like 1 GB per user.
> 
> 4) 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.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com