Ok, I have a small version of this running in our library. I have 5 debian workstations. One is a beefy job and thus becomes the X terminal server for the other 4. The others automatically start X and display the terminal's gdm login screen. It works a treat. Any special reason for using debian? So is this a thin client set up?
I'm running an after school club on these workstations tonight and plan to thrash them to see if it all grinds to a halt. :-)
How do you implement remote w/s builds across the network? I'd considered a duel partition and 'ghosting' across but most of these w/s only have 4GB HDDs. We try not to have CD-ROMs on any PC's as it's just another item to replace every term! I have these debian workstations authenticating from an RM Connect 2.4 server (NT4). Winbind and then a pam config - which is very picky but definitely works! If you did it with debian I could send you the config. But I know someone on this list offered to send me the config for SuSE when I was doing it with debian, so it's out there...?
If it's a success and easy to administer, then I'd like to be able to move away from the CC3 route altogether.
I've not managed to map MyWork to the linux machines :( The problem seems to me to be that the user's home directory on the RM server is not necessarily their username e.g. Jonathan Smith as a username would have jonatha1 as a homedir! Jonathan Jones (who came to the school later than Master Smith) would have a homedir of jonatha2. So I can't work out how to auto map the homedirs using pam_mount - which would be a breeze if homedir and username were the same. Any help? Is it not possible to have the client run a logon script to map drives etc. as one can with a windows client logging on to a NT/2000 server? Although it may be a pain to generate them.
This is why I was unsure about shares and maybe I'd get the users to email files to the RM system for now and authenticate against another server that i'm not so worried about if it gets trashed. And let's face it, if they're in the study areas, it'll be mini-clips et al all day long anyway, so not much work will need saving!
I'm using gnome, and intend to just rewrite the gnome config files for anything I want to restrict in a nightly cron job. Thus if little jonny breaks his desktop, it'll be fine in the morning... Obviously KDE has the kiosk framework which may be more use in locking down - which I'm not overly concerned about on these linux workstations (as long as they reset nightly to save on my "fix my desktop" admin). Why gnome? What are the advantages of KDE for example?
I'm getting to the position where I think that PC's should only be for hobbyists! For school/work the user should have a tool to do a job and nothing else - Unless you have a particular handicap, there is no reason for changing every minute detail of the box! It'll keep working longer if you leave it alone! Thanks