I am a support tech working in a mainly Windows environment, now working on a project where I need to build a small lab (6 machines for now), and find I need to do a lot of flying while still learning to walk.

I am reasonably intelligent, and actually enjoy looking things up for myself, but at the moment I am finding a lot of what I want to do requires so much new knowledge that at times I am unsure how to phrase the question properly for a good web/book search.

So here I am, hoping you humans can help me figure out some of what I am trying to say, getting me to ask the right questions, and hopefully filling in some of the blanks.

-Ian

First off, welcome to Linux Questions! I'm sure someone here will be able to answer almost any question you throw out.

What sort of lab environment are you building? What is the objective of it?

Thanks!

This is for patrons to use in a university library. Users all have accounts created elsewhere on campus, I am authenticating via LDAP, and so far I have that working, as well as auto-creation of home folders when they first log on.

Basically I need to get a number of things up and running, including network printing via a Win2k3 server, I would hope to have scripts that automatically connect them via sshfs to their network shares (prompt for password is fine by me), silence/automate PUP (I am running Fedora Core 6, btw) so basic users are not constantly prompted to add updates and I don't have to make daily passes on each machine, and generally tweak the interface (remove ability to Lock the screen, force all users to use bash, despite what the LDAP loginShell value says, many others). I want to keep these as useful to patrons as possible without letting them get tweaked too far out of line with one another (consistant user experience is needful), and, of course, I don't want someone with vastly superior knowledge of Linux to waltz in and laugh at glaring security holes I didn't even know were there... heh?

Again, I plan on scouring these forums a bit more before I start asking more specific questions in their own threads, but thats pretty much where things stand at the moment.

-I

Hi and welcome to LQ