So in College, I'm doing an I.T course that encompasses a few different areas of work in I.T and computing. In most of the courses, they've taught the use of various (often inferior) proprietary packages on Windows and Mac OS, but I've often used open-source alternatives on my Kubuntu laptop.
The last course, however, manages a theoretical college network set-up with Windows Server and Active Directory. I imagine that something similar, or even superior, is possible given Linux's flexibility, but so far I've not found quite the right solution.
Here are the requirements:
1. The users, groups, documents and settings have to be managed on the server.
2. Applications also have to be managed on the server. Though the set-up with Windows has server-installed applications automatically pushed to the clients when they're restarted, I expect X can do some sweet kind of magic here instead.
3. (This one's been the hold-up for me) If I have 3 average desktop machines, then I need to be able to install the server on any of them and be able to set-up the remaining two as clients. No specialised hardware. Therefore, specialised thin-clients or specialised network cards are a no-go.
Having done a great deal of research, Googling and playing with virtual machines, I'm interested and curious in the best way to manage this.
Considerations I've already had:
1. Using an NFS server for /usr, /etc and /home and having these mounted on boot-up. This was shot down pretty quickly, as every machine would need all users to be set up on them individually.
2. Setting up the machine to boot into a minimalistic local user in a virtual terminal, connect to the server via SSH with X forwarding and creating a new X session/Display Manager across the network. I seemed to be doing something wrong, because this didn't work.
3. Setting up XDMCP and having the local log-in screen automatically ask for a username and password, which would allow for logging-in to the server. This is another thing that I struggled with, since GDM's configuration has changed dramatically recently and most guides to this are out-of-date.
4. Having the client start up an X server to act as a server for the server's log-in screen or display manager. I've not tried this one out, 'cause I've no idea how to go about it.
Discuss!
Adv Reply
Originally Posted by HTML-insane
You sure sound like some managers I regularly have to deal with. 
But even for this kind of "terminal server" you'd still need decent hardware. You'd have to calculate around 256 MB RAM per concurrent user if you plan to serve out GNOME sessions. 128 MB or less per concurrent user if you use any of the smaller desktop sessions such as OpenBox, LXDE, FluxBox, etc.
Bookmarks