Re: small lab

[Stephan Engelke <engelke@gmx.net>]

Hi Mario

Mario Olimpio de Menezes writes:

> 	I need to set a small lab where one machine will be a server and
> 3 or 4 others clients. These clients will mount /home from server and I
> would like to have a central authentication. All machines already run
> potato.
> 	What's the better way to do this?
> 	Any suggestion is welcome, please!

I suggest you use the automounter (check the autofs and exports man
pages) to share the home-directories.

For central authentication you may want to look at NIS or NIS+ (more
secure).  I am not sure if there is a NIS+-impelentation available for
Linux (our site uses plain NIS).
These Network Information Services keep a password map in a central
server.

Name service can be achieved by either setting up a small DNS-Server
or via NIS/NIS+.  You do not really want to update /etc/hosts by hand
or automatically if you are running on a network -- in my expeirience
it's just to errorprone.

Cheers -- Stephan
-- 
Stephan Engelke                                    engelke@math.uni-hamburg.de
                                                           ***  ~, sweet ~ ***