[K12OSN] Distributed Samba deployment opinions?

[Chris Hobbs]

Quentin Hartman wrote:

>Colleagues-
>	I am going to be deploying a Samba domain / file serving infrastructure
>in my district this summer. The buildings in my district are
>interconnected via T1 lines, and the major design goals of this project
>are:
>
>1- Only Internet and authentication should generally traverse the T1
>links between buildings (each building has its own file server locally).
>
>2- Authentication should work globally so that people may easily move
>from building to building and still have things work, even if their home
>directory is not stored on the local file server.
>
>3- Home directories need to be easy to migrate from one file server to
>another should someone permanently change buildings.
>
Hi Quentin,

I'm looking at exactly the same scenario (several geographically 
separated buildings with T1 connectivity), with the added bonus of far 
too common network outages.

My plan is to have each of the site servers configured, effectively, as 
BDCs, each with their own LDAP server (slaved from the primary at the 
DO) and Samba authenticating local clients. The only difference between 
this and your stated goals is that not even authentication would 
traverse the WAN, just internet and the occasional user's data if 
they're away from their home site. I entertained the idea of using rsync 
to keep up to date files from all sites on all servers, but the times it 
would be needed are so few and far between that I didn't deem it 
worthwhile. I will be rsyncing all machines to one central server 
nightly for backups, which would also make a fine place to migrate a 
user from one site to another.

Hope this helps,

-- 
Chris Hobbs       Silver Valley Unified School District
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