An authentication setup that will work in a school

[David Trask]

The question has been asked about what can be done to make K12LTSP more
production-ready.  One thing that I feel is notoriously missing from all
of the "education" linux distributions is the lack of a central
authentication "server".  Many folks use Windows Active Directory....a few
use Mac OS X server.  I happen to use Samba/LDAP server.  Many of you in
the K12LTSP world know about the smbldap-installer created by Matt
Oquist...with a little input from me.  Having something like
smbldap-installer allows a school to break free of the chains of
proprietary OS's when it comes to authentication and home directories. 
I'd love to see K12LTSP take up the charge of giving school this
"advantage".  The smbldap-installer is stalled at the moment as Matt no
longer has the time...and he'd like others to pick it up and run with it. 
The files are all open source and can be found here
http://www.majen.net/smbldap    Am I way off base here?  Whaddya' think? 
Imagine...easy centralized authentication for multiple K12LTSP
servers...as well as other OS's.

David N. Trask
Technology Teacher/Director
Vassalboro Community School
dtrask at vcsvikings.org
(207)923-3100