At Sat, 10 Jul 2010 16:59:44 +0200 CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org> 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. LDAP (install openldap-servers on the server, install openldap-clients on the clients). > > 2) User home directories should also be on the server. NFS (everything you need is installed by default) > > 3) Users should all have disk quotas, something like 1 GB per user. ext2/ext3 (everything you need is installed by default) > > 4) Some shared directories should be read/write for a defined group of > users (teachers) and read-only for others. Standard UNIX uid/gid, served by LDAP, and handled by NFS. > > 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. LDAP is pretty straightforward. There is a quite good article about setting up LDAP (OpenLDAP) and migrating from file-based authentication on the RedHat RHEL documentation site (this applys equally well to CentOS). > > 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? LDAP and NFS. Samba really only makes sense if you are serving MS-Windows and/or Macs. Samba would be combersome in a pure-Linux environment. NFS would propagate standard UNIX permissions transparently. You could also use automount to reduce 'clutter' (only mount what is needfull on an as-needed basis). Visit: http://www.deepsoft.com/2009/08/setting-up-thin-clients-at-the-wendell-free-library-part-1/ For an article on how I set things up at our local Library. While this article mostly covers a server serving a bunch of *diskless* workstations, many of the basic ideas also apply to a situation with workstations with local disks. > > Any suggestions? > > Cheers from the hot South of France, > > Niki > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at centos.org > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos > > -- Robert Heller -- 978-544-6933 Deepwoods Software -- Download the Model Railroad System http://www.deepsoft.com/ -- Binaries for Linux and MS-Windows heller at deepsoft.com -- http://www.deepsoft.com/ModelRailroadSystem/