I have about 400 users and a mix of win98 and win2k (40 client machines) logging to a FC3 box (samba server).

If i decide to do a complete switch to all linux clients and linux server what is the linux equivalent of the samba server/domain. I recently setup a NFS server on the same FC3 box and works fine but it appears that the mounted shares are per machine and not per user which is what i want. I want the same effect as a logon.bat file so any user can use any pc.

Can i get at least a couple of keywords and a point in the right direction. From reading so far i am looking at NFS and NIS, is that what i need?

Thanks

You could always mount the user's NFS directory to /home. THis is what both my Uni's did for Linux/Unix. Share out a massive /home directory on the server, and mount it /home on the client.

Or are you asking about something totally different?

I want all my 400 users to be able to use any of the 40 machines without being local users. I need them to logon is to the domain where the server can authenticate the users. Then based on group i want to mount different shares. I do not want to add the users to each client machine.

I've heard there is a service like Terminal Services, as that might do the trick.

Another thing you could do is make all the clients simply boot off the server using the server's /etc directory for the password and user files. Not sure how well that would work.

And there's LDAP, but I'm not sure how that's implemented. I've *heard* it does authentication, but I've never worked with it.

I have exams for the next two weeks so I will get back to Linux-Linux then.

Thanks to all for the help so far

You can use either NIS or LDAP, with automount to acheive the desired effect. You add the users to either the NIS or LDAP server, then use the coresponding name service on the client to validate the user to the server, then the automounter will mount the users home directory for them.

I can with the NIS configuration and setup, but I'm just now trying to enable LDAP on a Linux client, so I won't be of much help there.

Jim Gillespie