Hi, I am a fifteen year-old freshmen in a small private school in Hutchinson, Kansas; I am the System Administrator, Tech Support Dude, etc. We are upgrading some systems and I want to have a Linux server for several obvious and not so obvious reasons (Security, Price, and because its Linux). I want to have a server that the computers can connect to for Authentication in both the Windows and Linux computers, as a file-server, and hopefully smbmount in the bootup for the Home directories, unless you'd recommend something like Thinstation.(We will mainly use Linux, but creating the Yearbook, for example must be done in Microsoft Publisher.) I would also like to know what distro to use on the server and the other workstations. (Mepis is installed on several computers and most of the kids love it.) Does anyone have any suggestions/solutions/contradictions/etc?

Many Thanks in advance and please excuse the ,
Ryan

For authentication, recent versions of SAMBA have the ability to act as a Windows 2000 Active Directory domain controller. That may be overkill in yor case and you might want to stick with NT4 style domains. Either way will work accross Linux and Windows clients. Alternatively, you can probably just use OpenLDAP although it might be some effort to get everything working together. If you use the Fedora Directory Server it probably will make htings easier, but I've never really used it before. For file sharing, I'd actually use NFS from the Linux clients simply because I find it less fuzzy than SMB. NFS isn't terribly secure, but if you lock down the client computers reasonably well and set sane defaults (root_squash on the exports), it shouldn't be a huge problem. You'll still need SAMBA to talk to Windows clients.

All this can be done on just about any distribution. I'd personally suggest CentOS (a free rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux) for compatibility reasons, but Debian, Slackware, and just about anything else can be made to work too.

Good luck! Sounds like a fun project.