--- Adrian Bates-Holland
Hi,
I've recently taken over as ICT co-ordinator at a primary school. At the moment, we have about 30 computers running a mixture of Windows 98 and XP.
A familiar setting. I'm a primary ICT co-ordinator also. Ok - firstly, in my opinion... it seems much easier doing this with Win98 than XP. Again in my opinion, it is much easier to do this with one workstation OS (either 98 or XP) rather than both. That doesn't mean it can't be done, but you have to have a grasp of some extra stuff in order to do it. Again, 98 seems easier than XP, or NT for that matter. I've achieved what you're after. Where are you? If you're near Hertfordshire, you can visit...?
At present, we have no dedicated server and I am very keen to get one set up. Obviously, as Linux is free, it is my preferred operating system for the server.
I've found it to have more advantages too...
I have installed SUSE Linux 9.1 Pro on a computer at home and played around with setting up a server but I don't seem to be having much luck.
SuSE is a good choice for setting things up using a graphic user interface, which is a nice way in. What aren't you having much luck with? I assume you have a couple of workstations at home too, and are not being successful in setting up samba?
Ideally I want a server to act as a domain controller so that staff and pupils can login and access their own individual/class work areas with a shared space for staff to store planning, etc.
It will do this admirably. My experience is doing exactly this, but with 98 only. This is what I did... I'll happily go into this in more detail. I can supply you with smb.conf and other handy things, but not from home (where I'm typing this). Use security = user in your smb.conf (if you don't know what smb.conf is, let me know and I'll start from scratch). I use two groups (setup using YAST2): users (already exists) and staff (created myself). This allows me to do a very simple desktop for either pupils (who belong to the users group as their primary group), or staff (who I obviously assign to the staff group as their primary group). I use mandatory profiles for this in 98. That means that I've got a template user for the pupils. I get that desktop and all the settings setup exactly the way I want them, then copy that profile to all pupils (making is a user.man - which makes it mandatory). If you don't know what mandatory profiles are, you need to google it. I point everyone's desktop to /server1/%g/desktop where samba subsitutes %g for the group the user belongs to (this needs me to check - which I can't do until I'm in school next week). This way pupils get a different set of shortcuts on their desktop to staff. In a primary school situation, I don't use passwords for pupils. Only staff have passwords.
Does anybody have any suggestions for setting this up? I'm really new to Linux so any advice would be very much appreciated!
You can of course work up to this, by using security = share in your smb.conf, forgetting about profiles and policies, having no users and just having folders that have password access on your server. It's not very satisfactory, but it's where I started 6 years ago. * Look at skolelinux (which looks to be very interesting to me) * Possibly Karoshi also. Please let us know what you can't get working... I'm sure someone will lend a hand (another advantage of comuunity based software) -- Matt Johnson ___________________________________________________________ALL-NEW Yahoo! Messenger - all new features - even more fun! http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com