Mauro Condarelli wrote:
Hi, I have a small (<8 hosts) lan with mixed Linux (debian) and winXP hosts. Up to now I managed the debian hosts manually (copying /etc/passwd, /erc/groups, ..., manually), but that is a real pain. I did recently suffer a severe breakdown so I reinstalled most of the machines. At this point I would like to setup some centralized way to manage the whole network. I would like to manage: - users (<20) - file servers (2) - printers (3) - firewall (ADSL, fixed IP, currently managed with shorewall/webmin) - mail (currently on a separate host, but I plan to move it to the firewall) In the past I used NIS, but that is UNIX-only. I know there's OpenLDAP, but I never used it. Probably some other package is available.
For a similar environment we use nis and samba (as domain controller) on a central file server. So all our user data is on one machine. It takes some effort to set up a 'good' samba domain, but it works. As far as I know there is a way to set it up to automatically use the same passwords for linux and Windows, but we have different passwords for linux/Winnt winxp. It's just one more step to set up a user.
My approach would be to set up one of your file servers as nis and samba master and backup config, passwd etc. to the second file server.
For our other linux boxes, we only keep package selection information.They are basically standard installations with almost no configuration except for IP, so they are quickly reinstalled, if anything goes wrong. (In fact, it takes less time to install Debian from scratch (from a local cache) than a complete virus scan takes on our XP-boxes :-)
Johannes (NB: domain conroll doesn't work for winxp home - only professional.)