Help needed setting up network for deprived children
 

Hi

Ive just bought 16 computers off ebay and i am setting up a course for deprived children to learn about computers.

I would like all the computers connected to a server, so i can give them internet access and also offer a cd burning facility, without buying 16 cdrw drives!

My main concern is this, i would like each kid to be able to log into any machine with there own username and password, and i would like this to bring up there own personal desktop (i am going to encourage changing settings and altering things!),

would this be possible by having one central /home directory on the server mounted with nfs on the other machines?

or is there more to it?

I would really like to do this as i do not want to have to say you can only use one machine, because there all different and i want them to have the chance to use them all.

Any help for these kids will be very appreciated

And who knows, i might even find some young future gurus!!!

What you are doing is really nice! Hats off to you and good luck. CD burning is tricky. it is better to have root permissions because often times the process can be broken and the results is a ruined disk if the burn proccess is initiated as a usr.

google around a bit for crdao which is a burning util and vcdimager.

Do you need volunteers?

I am planning on doing cd burning from my workstation like this:

Give them all a file on the server to copy the files they want burning to, and then burning it from my machine!

i would love volunteers, but im in the uk!

Really appreciate the effort you're putting in for the underprivileged. This is a similar sort of set up I prepared last month but without the CD ROM thingy. I prepared a scripted build for two servers (master and slave) . Master and Slave running ldap and users are also created on ldap. Both these servers run named, ldap, squid, mrtg, snmp, traps when system is underperforming etc etc and all on a scripted build.

For the client machines, I have a script to create a scaled down kiosk model running KDE. PAM auth is enabled on these machines. ldap.conf contains info to autheticate against the master and then let them in. This achieves the "domain kinda auth". Once authenticated they get the NFS share/username as the home directory. The clients cannot get shell access and other features as I've disabled it.

Automount may do it .. check this out
http://lists.suse.com/archive/suse-l...-Feb/0864.html

Let us know if you need help and we would be happy to help.

Once again .. keep up the good work.

SMB (samba) or NFS should do the trick coupled with the programs I listed above then.

Volunteers. This is the world wide web. I am sure some way exists for someone to help.