hello,

i've been an intermediate-level linux user for some years, and now i'm supposed to set up and manage a small network for our research group.

we have 5 linux boxes with ubuntu 10.04 (actually i'm installing everything we need in one box and will attempt to clone the others with clonezilla). i've 2 questions:

1) i'd like to manage all user accounts from one pc (server? so to say), so that every user can log in any of the 5 machines with the same passwd etc. what is the best/easiest/most stable application/protocol to manage this?

2) is it possible to create a network logical volume, based on the individual HDs and visible to all boxes? something like a RAID0 over ethernet? any suggestion of protocol/application?

many thx.

1) I believe if it's all linux, you're looking at setting up NIS. If there will be any other OS's attaching, you'll probably want to go with LDAP of some sort, either through Samba or openldap.

2) No idea. Network shares are typically handled through NFS, but I'm not sure you can create a network LV. You could just create one NFS share that all users could access though.

Other options you could do would be to have a central server and a bunch of thin clients.