Hello All.

I'm looking for some advice on a project we are trying to get of the ground.

I work in a school and we are trying to recycle some old computers to suit the needs of our music department.

We plan to setup around 18 machines running the 64studio v2.0 linux distro. Since there will be multiple classes I need to find a way of creating a file server so that all work files are saved onto the server, rather than the local machine. Hopefully this will allow for the students to log in on any machine and still access their work, plus it allow's for easier backup of all the work files.

At the moment I'm thinking that I need to setup a file server ( currently toying with the idea of either Fedora 8 or Centos 5.1 running samba), as I know this can be setup for this scenario using windows clients.

My knowledge of linux/samba does not go far enough to know if this is the correct/best solution when using an all linux setup.

Could anyone please offer any advise of the above scenario ??

Thanks in advance to any help offered.

Pete

If all the boxes are running linux it would not be necessary to use samba since there are no win32 network comms. Setup a server with the various users on it and then make the files available via NFS (Network File Share) to boxes on the network. You'll need to do some reading on creating NFS but it is fairly straight forward.

TigerOC is right. If no clients use Windows, Samba isn't the best choice. NFS is a good one. If you do have Windows clients or you will in the future, you'll need to setup a samba share when that happens.

-TDS-

you might find this worth reading: http://www.k12ltsp.org/contents.html

Hi Guys.

Thanks for your replies ....

Whilst reading through some of the NFS documentation it mentions running NIS servers and LDAP servers?? Is this sometinh I need to consider for my senario as above ?

NIS or LDAP would be an option as it will give you a security measures.
Also, if you need to keep home directories of users on server and want to allow them to access respective home directories from any client then NIS or LDAP could help you a great deal.