Re: Best options

[Lee Marzke <lee@marzke.net>]

Marty Squicciarini wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>    I have several linux boxes at home and I would like to have some 
> form of
> single sign-on for all my boxes.  I also have a few window laptops and a
> file server on linksys nslu2 reflashed with Unslug (a version linux).  
> What
> are my options?

For the easiest way:

NIS is relatively easy to setup on your main server, but has little 
security.  If
your on a private subnet you may be OK with this ( except for root logins ).
Each box could have a local root login,  and user logins defined over NIS.

Samba has a separate smbpasswd database, but if you update users and
passwords with Webmin , both UNIX and SMB password can be changed
at the same time.

If your a Windows luser,  you could have one NT style domain controller
setup, or the equivalent with Samba,  and authenticate Linux and Windows
off of it.

Otherwise you've got LDAP and Kerberos,  both of which are likely to
be more too much work to setup on the server side.   Perhaps Novell's
eDirectory ( which is free LDAP server ) might make this easier than working
with OpenLDAP - I haven't looked at it yet.

What I have done in some small shops is setup LTSP diskless terminals
for most of the Linux clients,  and used SMB logins for Windows.  Since
LTSP logins are via XDMCP you are actually logging into the main server.

The performance can be amazing with LTSP, OpenOffice starts up in like
1 second on an old 500Mhz PC client as long as one copy is already running
on the server.  This is because most of the shared libraries are already 
in RAM
and another OOO instance is very small.   I was quite impressed with LTSP,
but you can't expect to do multimedia or intensive graphics.

Lee Marzke
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