Universal authentification - how to make it possible?
 

Hello,

I kind of newbie in Linux. Lately I've been studying to create universal authentification to our network. But the more I read, the more I got lost :(

What I need is a server that can serve this 3 purpose:
- If the user logon using windows clients, they will have their documents in "My Documents" from the server.
- If the user logon using linux clients, they will have their documents in their home dir from the server.
- The user can login using any web browser, and get access to their files in the server using web interface.

What I know I need to learn more about LDAP, but still I can't figure out what I need to do first.

Thank you for your help.

First of all please define "windows clients" and "linux clients". I would personally use a simple ftp solution and confine users in their own directories (i.e chroot local users to their own home dir) and create My Documents for each of them in their home dirs. You may however pick up a diff solution.

Regards
Andy

What OS are the files stored on? I presume that all users files are stored on a central server and you have Windows and Linux clients available on the LAN.

When a user logs in you want the users to be able to locally access their files from the central server.

The normal practise for windows is to share out the users home directories in the server and give the users a mapped drive to their home directory from the client. You can pretty much do the same thing on the linux boxes, say by mounting the remote share to /home/$USER/"My Documents"

You can use a Linux or Windows box as the server for the above scenario. If you choose Linux you will probably want to use Samba to share the files. There is a special section for dealing with home directories in it's configuration file, and it can server as your LANs authentication source.

Here is a guide on using Samba with LDAP authenticaion

My server is Linux. I'm trying to do this with ubuntu 6.06 and Fedora Core 4, considering which is easier.

Right now, our client is Win98 and WinXP. But I'm thinking to move the client to linux entirely, so I need to figure out how to use the server's authentification from the linux box.

Any suggestion for linux clients so the user can going smoothly with the transition?