Being a school, we have a lot of users, a lot. It would be inconvenient
and to have home directories stored on the workstations instead of a
central location. Not to mention virtually impossible for me to mark if I
had to go to each machine to mark assignments.

with a Samba server and windows workstations I have all home directories
on the server with drive mappings pointing to users' home directories. I
assume I can do a similar thing with a pure Linux environment. NIS
server/client is only for authentication, right? so what would do the
serving up of home directories (which I will lump together into the
windows term of roaming profiles) so that no matter what workstation a
student sits at, they get their "Stuff"

Sounds silly but I only know the windows way of doing that.

Liam Marshall a écrit :
> Being a school, we have a lot of users, a lot. It would be inconvenient
> and to have home directories stored on the workstations instead of a
> central location. Not to mention virtually impossible for me to mark if
> I had to go to each machine to mark assignments.
>
> with a Samba server and windows workstations I have all home directories
> on the server with drive mappings pointing to users' home directories.
> I assume I can do a similar thing with a pure Linux environment. NIS
> server/client is only for authentication, right? so what would do the
> serving up of home directories (which I will lump together into the
> windows term of roaming profiles) so that no matter what workstation a
> student sits at, they get their "Stuff"
>
> Sounds silly but I only know the windows way of doing that.
>

NFS wouldn't be the solution ?

Liam Marshall wrote:
> with a Samba server and windows workstations I have all home directories
> on the server with drive mappings pointing to users' home directories. I
> assume I can do a similar thing with a pure Linux environment. NIS
> server/client is only for authentication, right? so what would do the
> serving up of home directories (which I will lump together into the
> windows term of roaming profiles) so that no matter what workstation a
> student sits at, they get their "Stuff"

i think this is where NFS (Network File System) comes in...

there is a HOWTO at <http://nfs.sourceforge.net/nfs-howto/>, which in the
intro also mentions some alternatives.

--
Joost Kremers joostkremers@yahoo.com
Selbst in die Unterwelt dringt durch Spalten Licht
EN:SiS(9)

On Thu, 15 Apr 2004 00:05:25 -0500, Liam Marshall <lsrpm@mts.net> wrote:
> with a Samba server and windows workstations I have all home directories
> on the server with drive mappings pointing to users' home directories. I
> assume I can do a similar thing with a pure Linux environment. NIS
> server/client is only for authentication, right? so what would do the
> serving up of home directories (which I will lump together into the
> windows term of roaming profiles) so that no matter what workstation a
> student sits at, they get their "Stuff"

Put the home directories on a central server and mount this filesystem
during startup on the clients. A very easy way would be to just have a
central samba server with the directories and then mount them at startup
with smb mount.

Sebastian
--
http://www.halle-ist-schoen.de/
Bilddokumentation der schoensten Saalestadt

Sebastian Stein wrote:
> Put the home directories on a central server and mount this filesystem
> during startup on the clients. A very easy way would be to just have a
> central samba server with the directories and then mount them at startup
> with smb mount.

AFAIK the samba file system does not support unix-like permissions and
ownerships, so you may not want to do it this way.

--
Joost Kremers joostkremers@yahoo.com
Selbst in die Unterwelt dringt durch Spalten Licht
EN:SiS(9)

Joost Kremers wrote:
[..]
> AFAIK the samba file system does not support unix-like permissions and
> ownerships, so you may not want to do it this way.

Sebastian is right, this could be easily done by samba.
No need to use NFS here (especially for security reasons).

--
10-4
Pe<>De
Miej zrodla szeroko otwarte

On Thu, 15 Apr 2004 15:22:45 +0200, PeDe wrote:
> Joost Kremers wrote:
> [..]
>> AFAIK the samba file system does not support unix-like permissions and
>> ownerships, so you may not want to do it this way.

I think you need to compile Samba feeding: "--with-smbmount" to
"configure", which Slackware defaults to _not_ do.

> Sebastian is right, this could be easily done by samba.

Yes.

> No need to use NFS here (especially for security reasons).

No need for NIS either. OP should be able to autenticate Linux users
through "winbind" against the Samba PDC.

And if recompiling Samba anyway, maybe read this post:
http://google.nl/groups?selm=pan.200...0deskt op.lan

BTW, Samba v3 can do NTLMv2 which is a little more secure then NTLMv1 -
not in the least because it prevents MIM attack.

HTH.

--
-Menno.

On 2004-04-15, PeDe <who@cares.com> wrote:
> Joost Kremers wrote:
> [..]
>> AFAIK the samba file system does not support unix-like permissions and
>> ownerships, so you may not want to do it this way.
>
> Sebastian is right, this could be easily done by samba.
> No need to use NFS here (especially for security reasons).
>
It could easily be done by Samba, but in a only linux env. i would say
NFS is the right choice. Samba does contain a lot of code
which has nothing to do with distributing files.

- Roar

"Liam Marshall" <lsrpm@mts.net> wrote:
> I assume I can do a similar thing with a pure Linux environment. NIS
> server/client is only for authentication, right?

Yes, NIS is very convenient in a network.

> so what would do the serving up of home directories (which I will lump
> together into the
> windows term of roaming profiles) so that no matter what workstation a
> student sits at, they get their "Stuff"
>
> Sounds silly but I only know the windows way of doing that.

The way to do it is to have one or more NFS servers exporting the home
directories. Then all clients should mount the home directories.

Something like this in /etc/exports on a NFS server:

/export/home1 @clients_netgroup(rw) backup_server(ro)

Something like this in /etc/fstab on a client:

the_server:/export/home1 /home/the_server nfs defaults 1 1

Something like this in passwd on the nis server:

user1:encrypted:1005:100:User Name:/home/the_server/user1:/bin/bash

If you want an advanced and very nice solution you could also add
automount maps to your NIS server and mount the home directories with
automount instead of hard NFS mounts in /etc/fstab. This way you will not
have to edit /etc/fstab on every client each time you add a new NFS server
or partition to a server. Adding a NIS map will require some modfication
of the yp Makefile and automount should be called with your NIS maps from
a startup script.

regards Henrik

--
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On Thu, 15 Apr 2004 14:58:47 GMT, Menno Duursma <menno@desktop.lan> wrote:
> I think you need to compile Samba feeding: "--with-smbmount" to
> "configure", which Slackware defaults to _not_ do.

I don't think this is needed, because I use the slackware samba package and
can do smbmount without recompiling.

Sebastian
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