Hi

This is my second ever post at LinuxQuestions, so be gentle

Some background: I'm an IT Engineer for various schools in my local area, and do pretty much everything - from fixing printers to setting up Active Directory domains. I work in a pretty Windows-centric environment and rarely encounter anything *nix through my work.

Due to funding issues a lot of schools do not have the resources to invest in their IT infrastructure, so I'm looking for ways to reduce costs. Which is why I'm here.

I want to set up a domain that will be relatively straightforward to implement and easy to maintain. When I finish my current position, other engineers should be able to step in and not face too much trouble. What I want to implement is thus:

A central server
- DNS
- DHCP
- Proxy
- File Server (NFS or SMB?)
- Centralised home directories
- Print Server
- Repository for Client machines to look to find updates
- Automatic download of updates into the repository

Client machines
- Mount a home directory from the server
- Download updates automatically from server
- Simple method of cloning the hard drive, so rebuilding a machine is just a case of insterting a disk and rebooting

I also want to be able to easily manage user accounts, including the automatic creation of home directories on the server.

How difficult would the above be to set up? Which distribution would be the best for doing so (I've mainly thought of using K/Ubuntu)? I'm sure there are packages available to tackle some of the above, but I'm not really sure were to look.

Thanks for reading and any input would be appreciated

generally it's pretty simple

- DNS - BIND / dnsmasq
- DHCP - DHCPD / dnsmasq
- Proxy - squid / tinyproxy
- File - NFS & Samba
- Home directories, same as file server
- Print - Cups
- Repository - depends what distro you're using, generally fine though

clients
- mounting home dirs - standard /etc/fstab stuff
- updates - cronjob entries or similar
- cloning - disk clones however you want to do them. distro's like centos and fedora also offer automated installations which you might prefer.

asically what you want to do is fairly simple. you have missed a few of the potentially more complex areas, e.g. centralized user management which i'd recommend openldap for, but generally it's all fairly simple.

Personally i would recommend fedora or centos for this. If you are after stable work machines then certainly centos would be best. if you are not aware, centos is a free clone of redhat which makes updates available for free too, so it's only the more security related things that you would probably be interested in anyway.

Cheers for that, I'm going to give those a go. This is more of a personal project that anything, so it's a case of finding time to figure everything out myself.

Thanks for the help - I have somewhere to start now