SL as server and clients in classroom, What are best solutions? What apps?

[Nicram]

Hello!
I'm very very happy user of SL on a hosting. for me it is rock solid, stable, and i never had any larger problems with it. But i always use it as hosting (lamp with few more addons).

I got new goal. I work at some school, and they use there some Windows SBS (small business server) 2003 with XP as client machines. SBS is domain controller, and XP are connecting with it. Because the SBS was very slow, they never use it, and never use network logins. The computer itself was loading for 45 or more minutes (it was configured with many unused services, and accounts prepared for few thousands users, while there are only few hundred students). With time i changed this SBS into Linux with firewall/dhcpd/masquerade and Samba with 1 shared folder for files. It had cool apps for administration (gadmin-samba and gadmin-dhcpd).

What i would like to do is to install SL on this server computer, and SL on the desktops. I would like to make those desktops to login using configured accounts on the server, so every student would have own login to use, so he would be able to save files on the server folder, with own user rights (so other users could not delete any of his files).

I would like it to be easy in later administration, with some GUI's like those gadmin that are now there - for creating users and passwords, and maybe possibility to setup some quota for files. The operating itself would be started from every desktop HDD (no PXE).

The thing is - i never done such thing before, and i would firstly want to prepare myself for that. I know there is edubuntu, but i very dislike debian/ubuntu based systems, i got always some problems witht hem, many times they do not work properly for me (in past, and in today), so i would like to use SL.

In the future, i would like to use all of the computers to build some little data center, that could be used as for example, render farm for povray projects etc. But this is very future.

I would like to ask, if there are people here that done it already? If yes, or not, where do You think i should start? What software to use for building this? what protocols to use? Samba? LDAP? something else? What GUI tools to use for future administration. Sometimes i will be not able to do it, so it must be something that teacher of history is able to do some little tweaks

I will be very grateful for any respond. Thank You.

[Nicram]

I will try to reply to myself because no one did In here i will show what i choose, why, and how to do it, so in the future someone can use this to achieve same goals.

I started to read about many solutions. To make login from linux client computer, using users and passwords on the linux server my choice is NIS. There are few options that i found: NIS, LDAP, FreeIPA, Samba.

Samba can work as Windows primary domain controller, so it allows Windows workstations to login, but i do not want to use Windows clients.

FreeIPA looks great, it have one LARGE advantage - Web Administration GUI! Finally something for ordinary people. I didn;t use it, because i found other solutions first and i check them first.

LDAP looks like some nice system, that can transport many informations, it is muuuuch more than what i need, it is quiet complicated, and there is no some easy solutions to implement it fast, and later administrate it by people without any Linux knowledge, so no option for me.

NIS was very simple to install and configure, just few lines in a few config files (less than 5!), and even less on the client machine. It need to install only few packages that are in repos, so this was my choice. Also it is possible to use standard GUI for making user accounts, and later one simple command line (that can be made with shortcut on the desktop) for building database of users and their passwords to use by clients. This is good, but i didn't try if changing password will work with that solutions.

But for now, partially i made it work (login over network) which is 50% of what i want to do. The second 50% is user home directory that will be on the server disk, and shared over network.

How to use NIS to connect over network (using SL 6.2 with EPEL repos enabled):

1. Server configuration
First install packages "yum install ypserv ypbind rpcbind"

Then edit file "/etc/sysconfig/network" and add line:
NISDOMAIN=yourserverdomain

another file to edit is "/etc/yp.conf", add line:
ypserver 127.0.0.1

Then we start services that we need:

CODE

/etc/init.d/rpcbind start /etc/init.d/yppasswdd start /etc/init.d/ypserv start

Now we must generate NIS database of users, passwords etc.
We use command "/usr/lib/yp/ypinit -m" that will give us some messages, that we do not care, just hit CTRL+d

After generating those info we start two more services:

CODE

/etc/init.d/ypxfrd start /etc/init.d/ypbind start

To check if everything works You can use command "ypcat passwd", so it should give You list of users with passwords (without system accounts).

If everything is ok, then that's all, now we can configure the client machine.

2. Client configuration
I have used Fedora 16 as client, but it will work also with SL 6.2 or any other similar Linux distribution that use rpm packages.

First we must install services with command "yum install ypbind rpcbind".

Then edit file "/etc/sysconfig/network" and add line:
NISDOMAIN=yourserverdomain

another file to edit is "/etc/yp.conf", add line:
domain yourserverdomain server IPofServer

We edit file “/etc/nsswitch.conf” ans search for line "passwd:", then we change this, and 2 other lines to be like this:

CODE

passwd: files nis shadow: files nis group: files nis

Because "yourserverdomain" can be not real domain, that is used only locally, it is nice to edit file "/etc/hosts" and add line like this:
IPofServer yourserverdomain

After this we just start services:

CODE

service rpcbind start service ypbind start

And that should be everything we need. From this moment we can login on client linux computer using logins and passwords stored on the server

Also it is good to make services start automatically on both computers.
One more information - after adding new users on the server we must use this command to synchronize them with NIS: make -C /var/yp/

[helikaon]

Hi Nicram,
thanks for posting and thanks for posting the solution right away.
Also cheers on moving from windows solution to linux one.

Just quick note - i used to work in company where the NIS and Samba were used together, because users were sitting sometimes on Windows clients, sometimes on AIX clients.
So we made their home directory same in Samba and in the NIS too.
Just in case you need to save some Windows machines ...

cheers,