I do some computer consulting work for a local school system... heres is my dilema...

For cost and security reasons I need to replace a Win NT 4 student server with a Linux server...

The workstations the students use are XP based and they login to the domain by using CTRL, ALT, DEL method.. also when they login to the domain a home folder is automatically created for that user within that domain.

So... My question is .. "Is it possible to implement these same features on a linux server and have it be transparent to the end user ??"

Also .. What would be the "right" distro to use ???

I use Slack at home but I really never delved into the heavy networking side of things, though I here its a good distro to use for such things.

Thanks in advance

Should be no problem. Just setup samba on the linux machine to take the place of the NT server. A quick google shows many links on replacing nt server with linux.
http://citnews.unl.edu/linux/LinuxPresentation.html

Brian1

Thanks for the quick reply... looks like its time to do some quality reading on setting up a Linux server.


After taking a little time and doing a little googling i have yet to find anything explaining how to tell samba to auto-create home directories for each new user that logs onto the domain... am i just missing something or is it just a security thing ???

This can be a difficult task in my eyes. It would be easier with scripts to generate the home user directories and other common needed changes. I am not that great at it but I am sure others can help here. Things I think that will be needed to make the change. Kind of the way I would procede with time.

First setup a Linux box.
Second configure Samba server to needed specs.
Thrid the migration.
Gather user names from the Windows Nt box.
You can use a password cracker and get the passwords on the users.
Now generate a text file with username and password seperated by some kind of symbol like a :

With user and password list one can generate a script to do the following.
Take the first name and password and send it to the adduser command to generate their home folder and password.

Next script is using the same user and password file to generate the samba user and password files. The dafault install of samba sets home user directories visible to the user only. Check the [home] section from /etc/samba/smb.conf file.

Next script you can migrate the users data from the Windows NT box to thier user home directory on the linux box. One can either copy all users data to the linux box and then using the user and password list and only use the username to copy from the Windows user directory to the linux home directory. I think this would be easier.

Now to make sure the users have ownership of thier files after the data transfer you can again use a script to pull the user names from the /home like ' ls /home > user.list '. Then take this file and run a script to take the first name and then run the commnads like chown and chgrp command.

Restart the samba server and see what is seen in network neighborhood on the Window client machines.

Again I am not great at scripts. I can do some but takes me a while to figure out how to do it. Commands to help you with the scripts. awk, sed, grep

All the above can be done in one script as well. I would gererate a small sample like 5 user and password list and test to make sure it all works before doing a large group.

If you get this worked out it would be of great help to post your procedure and contents of the scripts to help others in the future. I haven't yet searched here or googled the net to find scripts to do the above. I am sure someone has done this and posted the scripts somewhere. If I get some time this weekend I might put a few searches to see what I can find here or on google. I will look at some of my old scripts and see what if any would help.

Brian1

awesome info Brian..thank you. I will search around some more as well to see what I can come up with .. so far I've read about a package called PAM that does somthing along those lines. also I'm not sure how much data will acctually have to be transferred to the Linux box,... It would be much easier to just assign users a username and password that are alredy pre-configured in the addusr scripts.

but,.. this could also be a PITA if theres a large, constanley changing group of students logging onto teh server.

How do colleges do it ??? I can't see the move to Linux being cost efective if they have to hire additional IT support to maintain the Linux Servers ...??

I currently work at a College... we use scripts to automate user creation (and creating home directories on Linux boxes). Linux lends itself *very* well to automation by scripts, and script writing is an essential skill for getting much out of Linux. It's also very simple to learn, much more so than Windows scripting/programming. Colleges without Linux expertise in-house tend to just use Windows.

When I worked at a school most of the students came in at the beginning of the year, so we could run batch account creation once and then add individuals without automation.

Really useful links:

www.webmin.com - free and comprehensive system management tool, you should find that the text of the book "Managing Linux Systems with Webmin" is a free download from the book publisher.

www.linuxcommand.org - gentle and very good introduction to Linux shell scripting.

Also, the Samba site has the text of several books available for free download - you will find looking at that a good investment.

thank you everyone for your help again this is great stuff !!
If I can think of anything else i'll be sure to ask..

mike