I'm a chemistry prof at a university. I handle my own lab and the computers therein. Currently, it is a collection of six Debian Squeeze, two Etch and one Lenny systems connected to the university's WLAN (and the Internet) through one system acting as a firewall, sharing a single university-assigned IP.

I would like to allow any of my students to use any of the computers without having to routinely perform "adduser" to each of the computers. Ideally, logging in on Computer A would present the same home director as logging in on Computer B. I tried running NIS and then LDAP, but found them rather difficult and while I got it working at one point, eventually upgrading the Squeeze server seemed to have crashed the LDAP on the Etch systems.

I'd appreciate any advice on the easiest way to allow me to do this. Thanks.

At my school they use AFS (Gentoo guide) to have the same ~ between hundreds of computers and 4 OSes. However I have never done anything like this, so I have no idea about how it works. Hope it helps you though.

Serafean

I'll look into this - there's debs in the Debian collection already, and at first sight, it looks very promising.