Does anyone have any practical experience in supporting a network of about 130 linux workstations? These would be added to an existing network of about 100 XP workstations. These workstations would be spread out over 40 locations in two states.

Fortunately our needs are simple. Users would need access to a few key web sites, terminal services and a samba share. And it wouldn't be a problem converting that samba share to a NFS share if need be.

Perhaps my biggest question mark is remote support. We'd need vnc and it would have to be fairly easy for the first tier techs to use. We also don't want to open up a bunch of ports on each location's firewall. If I knew how to accomplish this I could really start to see how we could make this work.

Thank you in advance for your advice!

Why the need for VNC? You should be able to do most things with their workstations from the command line using ssh. Also only use Samba if the file server they need to access is actually Windows. Use NFS if it's Linux to Linux or Linux to Unix, etc.

The only tricky part is how they're spread out across locations. Do you have VPN access to each? That would be the safest option when you needed to connect to them. Certainly don't want to open up ssh on each machine and have them all on public interfaces. Perhaps create a backdoor or jump machine to gain access to each one at each location would be a logical approach.

It's not practical for us to support those workstations with ssh. One reason are our users. 99% of them are not technically literate at all. Many times there is no way of determining their problem without seeing what they are seeing. The only way I know what in the heck they are talking about is if I remote in and say: "Ok...show me what you are doing".

The second reason is our first tier support. They are not familiar with linux or ssh. I don't see that as being a major problem as long as they can vnc in. But maybe I'm being overly optimistic. That's what I'd like to test.

In the past I've tried to find a solution that breaks out of the "linux servers, windows workstations" model. I haven't discovered anything yet.

I just can't believe that there aren't other companies out there that haven't accomplished a linux server, linux workstation environment. Maybe folks are going with thin clients...who knows. Or maybe they don't have the technically challenged user base that we have.

My Sincere suggestion to you is my friend just try the Knoppix Live CD or Puppy Linux Live CD or Ubuntu CD.

There you can understand your requirements and what flavour of distribution of linux you require almost the Linux deployment is easy comparing with the windows. Only thing is inter operability among the Windows application. (I think you can understand).

Every Windows application alternative can be found in Linux and ofcourse those may customizable according to your needs. I.e you can put your organization image or configuration which is fixed to all the clients.

So, First just try the LiveCd which will give you full information about your environment compatability.

This is my personal experience.

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Also try to read the Linux For You magazine regularly which will provide you some information about how to connect to the internet through linux i.e modem installations

You could use tight vnc on both windows and Linux. There are also a couple similar programs that are part of KDE. You would be able to log into a session on either Windows or Linux from Either Windows or Linux.

You could still use ssh for some programs by setting up keys on each computer and changing the command for the icon to actually use ssh to start a program on a different computer. This may be more useful from the Administrator's end, and the admin may not need this crutch however.

If you are stuck on a Windows machine, and you need to configure a remote users Linux machine, you could use Cygwin/X, which would give you both ssh and an X Windows server. This would allow you to run the Linux distro's gui configuration wizards without the overhead of displaying an entire session.
It would also allow you to have two such programs side-by-side for two separate remote hosts. That would allow you to from Computer A, configure Computer B using Computer C as a model.

Suppose that a user was getting a new computer on a remote site. If you can ssh into each, you can use konqueror, and the fish protocol. In konqueror, you can split the file browser into separate panes. You could drag and drop the users documents from the left pane (old computer) and drop them into the right pane.

One of the things I like about ssh is it allows one to quickly access files when there isn't a share or ftp service set up.

You didn't say much about how the Windows machine is setup. The Using Samba book has examples on configuring Samba server so that a network administrator member can use the same windows tools to add users and hosts, and so that when a user changes their password, it will change for both windows and Linux. The 2nd Edition comes with samba. The 3rd Edition was updated to include AD information, and is available in book stores.