Re: small lab

[Joachim Trinkwitz <jtr@uni-bonn.de>]

Mario Olimpio de Menezes <mario@curiango.ipen.br> 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.

I did this for 15 workstations and 1 server with NFS and NIS --
following the Debian installation instructions for NIS there were no
problems with that (only shadow passwords had to be turned off). I use
no automounter as recommended here because I don't see any need for
this (why unmount /home?).

> 	What's the better way to do this?

Better as more secure would be to use cfengine (packaged in Debian, of
course), but I never managed to set up a working script and took the
lazy approach above -- it worked `out of the box'. On the other hand,
my users are not the hacker type and mostly don't have any Unix
knowledge at all, so I hope not to take some bigger risks.

I would like to try replacing NIS with LDAP, but by now this seems not
obvious (= uncomplicated) for me.

Greetings,
joachim