Login from any terminal to personalised desktop

[Tim Vaughan]

Hi Al,

Thanksk for those links, I'll take a look.  It looks more complicated
than I had hoped, but not impossible!

Tim

On 9/11/05, Al Gordon <runlevel7 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/11/05, Tim Vaughan <talltim at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm investigating running an IT lab on Ubuntu.  It'll be used for
> > internet, email and office tasks for a charity that I work for.  I
> > want the users to be able to sit down at any PC, log in and have all
> > their personalised settings, files, home directory etc. available
> > regardless of which computer they use.
> >
> > What's the easiest way of doing this?  I'm aware of LTSP and am
> > looking into that as well but it looks pretty complicated.  Another
> > way which I think might work is to have GDM authenticate against an
> > LDAP server but I've never done this and I don't know how to tell it
> > to automatically mount a user's home directory.
> >
> > Any ideas?
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Tim
> 
> The easiest way?  One easy way would be to use something like Safedesk
> (http://www.safedesksolutions.com/).  You pretty much plug the server
> in, boot the workstations from a floppy, and away you go!  I've
> implemented this for a customer, and it was a breeze.  The Safedesk
> guys seem to be distro-agnostic as well, so if you want Ubuntu on the
> server, you should be able to do it.  Not free, but not overly
> expensive, either.
> 
> Another solution would be to run OpenLDAP for authentication, and have
> a server that serves up home directories for the users via NFS.
> There's a pretty good guide at
> http://www.nomis52.net/?section=docs&page=samldap on how to do this
> fairly quickly and easily, on Debian.  It shouldn't be much (if any)
> different for Ubuntu.  They cover doing this for Samba, which is
> something to consider.
> 
> Documentation that may be a little closer to what I describe is at
> http://cs.dixie.edu/ldap/.  They cover the NFS side of things, at
> least.  However, I like the one I recommended at nomis52.net, since it
> uses phpldapadmin, which is a pretty slick interface.
> 
> --
> 
>   -- AL --
>