Re: Setting up a bunch of boxen at a small school.

[Sunny Dubey <dubeys@bxscience.edu>]

On Monday 24 September 2001 04:11 am, Karsten M. Self wrote:
> on Mon, Sep 24, 2001 at 02:50:32AM +0200, oivvio polite (ol1@v10a.com) 
wrote:
> > I might soon have to set up some 20 - 30 boxes supporting some 200
> > students.  They'll want to do word processing, browse the web, read
> > mail.
>
> Lots of apps for the above.
>

<snip snip>

I'm guessing you haven't stepped inside a high school recently ...
while the apps you recomend are great and whatnot, 
do you really believe that students will take the time to learn any of those 
apps??  if most linux users don't want to learn TeX, or emacs, how are you 
going to get students to learn??  (especially when this is only for school, 
and not the real world outside, where sadly email apps like outlook are just 
about standard.)

>
> 	There are many other mail clients, these are some of the best.
>
> > Of course any user should be able to log into his/her account from any
> > box.  What are my options here?
>
> NIS will do this for you.  You'll also want NFS to remotely mount user
> directories.  This largely reserves the individual workstations as
> satellites.  You'll configure them largely identically.
>

NIS isn't the more secure system in the world.  (I think using rsync over ssh 
would be even more secure than NIS).  He could try ldap, which is supported 
by most operating systems, and linux has the PAM modules for ldap too.

<snip snip>

Sunny Dubey