[K12OSN] Managing identical logins...

[Les Mikesell]

On Wed, 2005-02-02 at 23:36, Tom Lisjac wrote:

> > >If you are willing to accept anyone being able to delete, copy or
> > >overwrite anyone else's work...  That doesn't sound reasonable in
> > >a hostile environment like a school.
> 
> Kids sharing a physical classroom can steal each other's books and
> look over the shoulders of others. The network equivalent of this
> hasn't been a problem for us compared to the virtually impossible task
> of managing thousands of individual student accounts.

I'm... speechless.  I don't even know how I'd respond if my kids
school said they were unable or unwilling to keep track of the
student's names.  Or that their system was designed such that
if two people use the same filename, one loses his work.

> I never said that individual logons had individual rights... a single
> class login is shared by a single class of 20 to 30 kids.

That's not exactly true.  The nature of windows is that you have
an entire box dedicated per user, sharing nothing.  So even if you
give all users the same login name or even set up the boxes to
automatically log in with it, each box has an unshared copy
of the registry and a local hard drive to save it where the
local desktop and windowing state can live.  The only part they
really share is the mapped drive from the server.  To get the
equivalent in Linux/unix, you would need a local install on
every PC or a unique home directory per user (either of which
is cheaper and easier than the local windows install...).

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com