CentOS - Jul 2010 - Simple solution for small network in a school ?

Hi,

I have to install a small network in a school in a nearby village. The 
network will be Linux-only, one server and fifteen desktops. Here's the 
idea.

1) Authentication should be managed centrally on the server.

2) User home directories should also be on the server.

3) Users should all have disk quotas, something like 1 GB per user.

4) Some shared directories should be read/write for a defined group of 
users (teachers) and read-only for others.

So far, I've only dealt with local authentication. I have a little 
practice in basic setups of Samba and NFS and managed to get these to 
work OK. On the other hand, I've never worked with NIS, LDAP or the likes.

My question is more general, and I don't want to go into technical 
details. According to the KISS principle, which solution would you 
recommend (or explicitly *not* recommend)? A mix of LDAP and Samba? Or 
NIS and NFS? And what's this thing called Directory Server, which 
vaguely sounds like it's the right way to go?

Any suggestions?

Cheers from the hot South of France,

Niki

On Sat, Jul 10, 2010 at 11:59 AM, Niki Kovacs <contact at kikinovak.net>
wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I have to install a small network in a school in a nearby village. The
> network will be Linux-only, one server and fifteen desktops. Here's the
> idea.
>
> 1) Authentication should be managed centrally on the server.
> 2) User home directories should also be on the server.
> 3) Users should all have disk quotas, something like 1 GB per user.
> 4) Some shared directories should be read/write for a defined group of
> users (teachers) and read-only for others.
We have a similar setup with OpenLDAP and NFS. Works OK, except all
directories defined are home to the users, and only their owner can
read them. Adding users or changing passwords is an admin-only hassle,
because we have never found a user management tool for LDAP which was
convincingly able to be given away to teachers.

--
Eduardo Grosclaude
Universidad Nacional del Comahue
Neuquen, Argentina

On Jul 10, 2010, at 10:59 AM, Niki Kovacs <contact at kikinovak.net>
wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have to install a small network in a school in a nearby village. The 
> network will be Linux-only, one server and fifteen desktops. Here's the
> idea.
> 
> 1) Authentication should be managed centrally on the server.
Use some type of directory service (LDAP/NIS) coupled with an authentication
service like Kerberos.

Basically keep passwords out of the directory and you need to have a Kerberos
ticket to access the directory.
> 2) User home directories should also be on the server.
Not a problem, you can share these out via NFS and/or Samba.
> 3) Users should all have disk quotas, something like 1 GB per user.
Also not a problem to setup quotas and use rquotad to remotely query these from
NFS clients. Samba has builtin support for quotas.
> 4) Some shared directories should be read/write for a defined group of 
> users (teachers) and read-only for others.
Standard posix perms can take care of that, for finer grained perms you can use
ACLs.
> So far, I've only dealt with local authentication. I have a little 
> practice in basic setups of Samba and NFS and managed to get these to 
> work OK. On the other hand, I've never worked with NIS, LDAP or the
likes.
NIS is easier then LDAP and might be a good quick-n-dirty way to get going
initially. Just use a separate authentication service like Kerberos and keep
passwords out of the directory service.
> My question is more general, and I don't want to go into technical 
> details. According to the KISS principle, which solution would you 
> recommend (or explicitly *not* recommend)? A mix of LDAP and Samba? Or 
> NIS and NFS? And what's this thing called Directory Server, which 
> vaguely sounds like it's the right way to go?
You can really mash all these technologies up.

If all clients are Linux then start with NFS/NIS/Kerberos then as things grow
you can look to move to LDAP.

The "Directory Server" is a turn-key package for implementing LDAP
plus Kerberos with a pre-established LDAP schema and tools to manage it.

Definitely worth taking a look at. Personally I don't have experience with
it so can't recommend or not recommend it.

You COULD also have a Windows Active Directory server to provide LDAP and
Kerberos services to your Linux environment. They definitely have nice
management tools. MS for not-for-profit is dirt cheap. Run it as a
VMware/VirtualBox/KVM/Xen VM. Hell, run the whole server as an ESXi host and
have multiple VMs for redundancy/load spreading.

-Ross

At Sat, 10 Jul 2010 16:59:44 +0200 CentOS mailing list <centos at
centos.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I have to install a small network in a school in a nearby village. The 
> network will be Linux-only, one server and fifteen desktops. Here's the
> idea.
> 
> 1) Authentication should be managed centrally on the server.
LDAP (install openldap-servers on the server, install openldap-clients
on the clients).
> 
> 2) User home directories should also be on the server.
NFS (everything you need is installed by default)
> 
> 3) Users should all have disk quotas, something like 1 GB per user.
ext2/ext3 (everything you need is installed by default)
> 
> 4) Some shared directories should be read/write for a defined group of 
> users (teachers) and read-only for others.
Standard UNIX uid/gid, served by LDAP, and handled by NFS.
> 
> So far, I've only dealt with local authentication. I have a little 
> practice in basic setups of Samba and NFS and managed to get these to 
> work OK. On the other hand, I've never worked with NIS, LDAP or the
likes.
LDAP is pretty straightforward.  There is a quite good article about
setting up LDAP (OpenLDAP) and migrating from file-based authentication
on the RedHat RHEL documentation site (this applys equally well to
CentOS).
> 
> My question is more general, and I don't want to go into technical 
> details. According to the KISS principle, which solution would you 
> recommend (or explicitly *not* recommend)? A mix of LDAP and Samba? Or 
> NIS and NFS? And what's this thing called Directory Server, which 
> vaguely sounds like it's the right way to go?
LDAP and NFS.  Samba really only makes sense if you are serving
MS-Windows and/or Macs.  Samba would be combersome in a pure-Linux
environment.  NFS would propagate standard UNIX permissions
transparently.  You could also use automount to reduce 'clutter' (only
mount what is needfull on an as-needed basis). 

Visit:

http://www.deepsoft.com/2009/08/setting-up-thin-clients-at-the-wendell-free-library-part-1/

For an article on how I set things up at our local Library.  While this
article mostly covers a server serving a bunch of *diskless*
workstations, many of the basic ideas also apply to a situation with
workstations with local disks.
> 
> Any suggestions?
> 
> Cheers from the hot South of France,
> 
> Niki
> _______________________________________________
> CentOS mailing list
> CentOS at centos.org
> http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
> 
>     
-- 
Robert Heller             -- 978-544-6933
Deepwoods Software        -- Download the Model Railroad System
http://www.deepsoft.com/  -- Binaries for Linux and MS-Windows
heller at deepsoft.com       -- http://www.deepsoft.com/ModelRailroadSystem/

Niki Kovacs wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have to install a small network in a school in a nearby village. The 
> network will be Linux-only, one server and fifteen desktops. Here's the
> idea.
> 
> 1) Authentication should be managed centrally on the server.
> 
> 2) User home directories should also be on the server.
> 
> 3) Users should all have disk quotas, something like 1 GB per user.
> 
> 4) Some shared directories should be read/write for a defined group of 
> users (teachers) and read-only for others.
> 
> So far, I've only dealt with local authentication. I have a little 
> practice in basic setups of Samba and NFS and managed to get these to 
> work OK. On the other hand, I've never worked with NIS, LDAP or the
likes.
> 
> My question is more general, and I don't want to go into technical 
> details. According to the KISS principle, which solution would you 
> recommend (or explicitly *not* recommend)? A mix of LDAP and Samba? Or 
> NIS and NFS? And what's this thing called Directory Server, which 
> vaguely sounds like it's the right way to go?
> 
> Any suggestions?
You might want to look at ClearOS before tackling this yourself.  It is 
CentOS-based but comes up with a slick web based administration program and uses
LDAP for authentication out of the box.  It uses openldap and I think it is 
integrated with samba so you could use windows clients if you wanted.  On 
something of that scale I don't think you'd have to worry about the
performance
or replication differences in openldap or directory server - the administrative 
tools you use will be more important.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com

Greetings,

On 7/10/10, Niki Kovacs <contact at kikinovak.net>
wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have to install a small network in a school in a nearby village. The
> network will be Linux-only, one server and fifteen desktops. Here's the
> idea.
KISS Princple: ext3 with ACL enabled (better xfs/zfs -- in centos if
available) with a script for adding users wrapping the newusers.And
oh, gulsterefs or whatever if you want to throw in hpc.. y'know R and
renderers just love hpc and children would love their animation coming
up so fast...

A million dollar Idea if all the nodes had hard disks.. [sigh.. this
wrong way to promote business in this list...]

HTH

Regards,

Rajagopal

2010/7/10 Niki Kovacs <contact at kikinovak.net>:
> Hi,
>
> I have to install a small network in a school in a nearby village. The
> network will be Linux-only, one server and fifteen desktops. Here's the
> idea.
>
> 1) Authentication should be managed centrally on the server.
>
> 2) User home directories should also be on the server.
>
> 3) Users should all have disk quotas, something like 1 GB per user.
>
> 4) Some shared directories should be read/write for a defined group of
> users (teachers) and read-only for others.
for a small setup like this, I would go with LTSP.

Hi Niki,


Have you had a look at the K12 systems available from different distro
vendors? It is build specifically for schools.

http://www.google.co.nz/search?q=linux+K12&hl=en&safe=off&prmd=v&source=univ&tbs=vid:1&tbo=u&ei=NTQ6TJjAGIvEsAP2j71R&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4&ved=0CDEQqwQwAw

http://www.k12opensource.com/

http://www.k12opentech.org/implementation-study-2-indiana-desktop-linux

https://fedorahosted.org/k12linux/

Kind regards,
Carel


-- 
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

 Carel Lubbe

 Mobile:  +64 (0)27 333 6817
 E-mail:  carel.lubbe at gmail.com
 Linkedin: http://nz.linkedin.com/in/calli
 Linux counter #183244
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

On Sun, Jul 11, 2010 at 2:59 AM, Niki Kovacs <contact at kikinovak.net>
wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have to install a small network in a school in a nearby village. The
> network will be Linux-only, one server and fifteen desktops. Here's the
> idea.
>
> 1) Authentication should be managed centrally on the server.
>
> 2) User home directories should also be on the server.
>
> 3) Users should all have disk quotas, something like 1 GB per user.
>
> 4) Some shared directories should be read/write for a defined group of
> users (teachers) and read-only for others.
>
> So far, I've only dealt with local authentication. I have a little
> practice in basic setups of Samba and NFS and managed to get these to
> work OK. On the other hand, I've never worked with NIS, LDAP or the
likes.
>
> My question is more general, and I don't want to go into technical
> details. According to the KISS principle, which solution would you
> recommend (or explicitly *not* recommend)? A mix of LDAP and Samba? Or
> NIS and NFS? And what's this thing called Directory Server, which
> vaguely sounds like it's the right way to go?
>
> Any suggestions?
>
> Cheers from the hot South of France,
>
> Niki
> _______________________________________________
> CentOS mailing list
> CentOS at centos.org
> http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
>

On 7/10/2010 10:59 AM, Niki Kovacs wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have to install a small network in a school in a nearby village. The
> network will be Linux-only, one server and fifteen desktops. Here's the
> idea.
>
> 1) Authentication should be managed centrally on the server.
>
> 2) User home directories should also be on the server.
>
> 3) Users should all have disk quotas, something like 1 GB per user.
>
> 4) Some shared directories should be read/write for a defined group of
> users (teachers) and read-only for others.
>
> So far, I've only dealt with local authentication. I have a little
> practice in basic setups of Samba and NFS and managed to get these to
> work OK. On the other hand, I've never worked with NIS, LDAP or the
likes.
>
> My question is more general, and I don't want to go into technical
> details. According to the KISS principle, which solution would you
> recommend (or explicitly *not* recommend)? A mix of LDAP and Samba? Or
> NIS and NFS? And what's this thing called Directory Server, which
> vaguely sounds like it's the right way to go?
>
> Any suggestions?
>
> Cheers from the hot South of France,
>
> Niki
> _______________________________________________
> CentOS mailing list
> CentOS at centos.org
> http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
for simple solutions such as this i use a distro that is designed for 
this purpose.  Three coe into my mind
sme server
e-box
and clearos

of these i have found e-box to the the most reliable and easiest to 
use.  Now i have not used them in a purely Linux environment but they 
should work well..:)