On Thursday 31 Jan 2002 16:58 pm, Chris Howells wrote:
On the server side, CUPS would be used for the printing system and all machines will have ext3 formatted hard discs.
Sounds reasonable, although ReiserFS is more mature ;-) (start filesystem flamewars here. And end here ;-)
Or even a printing system flamewar... One relevent factor is that AFAIK, ReiserFS does not support file quotas, since ext2 does presumably ext3 does.
* A database such as NIS would probably be used for the administrative database
NIS is only used for sharing passwords. For the purposes described above, a
NIS also shares information on usernames, GCOS and group membership.
simple MySQL database (or even some LDAP system, for people who like buzzwords) would probably be better.
How easy is it to set up either MySQL or LDAP to have a replicated database and to transparently switch between copies though?
* Upon loggin in (via kdm) the system would map the user's home directory on the server to the /home/user directory on the user name. NFS or SMB are possibilities here.
Or simply have /home NFS mounted automatically at boot time, rather than at login time.
Which makes quite a few other things easier too.. Hardly an original idea though :)
* There will be some user based administrative tools. This will allow the user to change his/her password via a web browser. There will also be an information page showing stuff like information about disc/print quotas.
Webmin, possibly, may be useful?
Make more sense for this to be attached to a webmail system, but little point doing this for someone actually sat in front of a workstation. Instead makes far more sense to have GUI versions of (yp)passwd and quota... -- Mark Evans St. Peter's CofE High School Phone: +44 1392 204764 X109 Fax: +44 1392 204763