I have several slackware boxes in my home and I want to learn how to centralize security. For now I've created user accounts with adduser on every machine.

I have experience with Windows Domains and understand that a workstation joins the domain and authenticates login requests to the domain controller. The workstation will also automatically create a home directory on the workstation if the login is sucessful. I don't have any idea what the Linux/ Slackware/ equivalent is.

A few terms have come up during my searching, Kerberos, OpenLDAP, PAM as have certain techniques such as exporting a /home on a server and mounting it on each client so that every user will have their home directory wherever they are. But I'm not sure how these pieces all fit together.

A more extensive question might be; how to setup a Slackware 10.2 lab of 25 computers for 200+ students. There's no way any Admin would run adduser on 25 computers for 200 students, no, there's gotta be a better way.

Thanks for any help.

I believe you are looking for something like NIS. I am not familiar with it but if you do a google on it you should get all kinds of help.

I recommend you take a look at OpenLDAP. The client comes with Slackware, and the server can be found at linuxpackages.net if you don't want to compile your own.

For using LDAP on Slackware, have a look at these links:
http://wombat.san-francisco.ca.us/fa.../cache/95.html
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8119
http://enterprise.linux.com/enterpri....shtml?tid=129
(in no particular order..)

NIS is great, but has no security (passwords in cleartext etc) - NIS+ is better, but used to be SUN proprietary, and is not maintained on Linux since LDAP gained popularity. For an open, flexible and reasonably easy system to administer, you can't go wrong with LDAP. O'Reilly has a good book about it too!

-Y1

Thanks Yalla-one,

I never knew about openldap. Will it allow windows authentication also by chance?

Samba and OpenLDAP together can emulate a Windows Domain (not Active Directory) and a Windows 2000/XP workstation won't know the difference.
Well, technically speaking, Samba can do this on it's own, but if you start about tens or hundreds of user accounts, LDAP as the backend is a lot smarter. Also, with Samba/OpenLDAP you can setup a Windows Domain distributed over multiple servers (to share the load and for better redundancy) and with one user database.

Eric

Wow. Thanks for the reading material. That's alot of new terms. I guess I'll start by trying to get an OpenLDAP server installed up and running. I think I'll start with this http://www.openldap.org/doc/admin23/quickstart.html. It seems that OpenLDAP can do alot, authentication, centralized contact list, automounting your home directory; are all I've read so far. Does this tie in with storing ssl keys (id_pub.key which I use for passwordless ssh sessions) or is that Kerberos? Do Kerberos and OpenLDAP get used together at all?