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Hi to all of those running RM out there, can I pick your brains please? Well one of my schools is running RM, but TBH with RM I'd say it'd be crawling :) I have no idea what you mean! :-)

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I intend to attempt to have these machines locked down until they squeak as they will be in no-go zones. My question is, if anyone uses LINUX w/s in this form, do they authenticate against the RM servers and if so are there any issues with this? (I authenticate against a WIN2000 box at home, but this is a 'safe' environment and we don't really hot-desk!) And, assuming that you do, do you allow access to the "mywork" areas?

Having it authenticate against the NT4 servers isnt a problem, I've a half written howto around here somewhere that I can let you have on using winbind. Mounting the users home dirs might well be a bit trickier, to mount a smb share you need the absolute path. It might be better to install an NFS server on the NT4 boxes and share out the directories that way. ***sorry crappy OE :-( I'd be interested in seeing that if you can find it.

Another alternative, given that files will need to be written by the clients to the shares, is to redirect all homes to the local /tmp, and then have a script that mounts the users /home (mywork) after the session has started. Since the w/s will be 'out of sight' then I susspect that most of the time will be spent at mini-clips et all (hello ACLs & Delay Pools!) So I may just have users email work to their RM addresses. and authenticate against a linux box.

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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!

This one is tricky, we use G4U at Trinity for our dual boot 98/Linux clients and go around with floppies. We tried Altiris, but couldnt get it to work (and you wont get any support from the company), Zen looks like it'll be an option, as might LSLSA, but the latter currently needs a caching network FS. We're researching this at the moment. Floppies will not be a problem, obviously RM uses that, and I'd implimented similar on a Novell/3.11 network - saved me days of building!

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If it's a success and easy to administer, then I'd like to be able to move away from the CC3 route altogether.

Well the CC3 route leads to iirc 15 min boot times, no real control over your network and no real improvement over what Xp + some kind of LDAP already can provide with a little work, all it does is package it all together. ***RM get upset when you mention the logon times :-)

Kind regards Adrian