[K12OSN] LDAP auth for non-existent accounts & best way to add a K12LTSP server to university network

Jay Pfaffman pfaffman at gmail.com
Wed Jul 27 02:14:36 UTC 2005


I'm trying to set up a K12LTSP box for my university.  I'd like to
authenticate against the university's LDAP (or AD) server for logins
and Samba.  If I add a user, they can authenticate against ldap like I
want (SMB works for Mac clients, but not Windoze clients, go figure). 
I don't know who my users will be and don't want to have to add them. 
Is there some (easy) way to make it so that if they log in and the
account doesn't already exist it gets set up & stuff copied from
/etc/skel and so on?

Any ideas why Macs can mount Samba, but XP has a problem with
authenticating?  I read something about Samba trying blank passwords
first or something to try to solve some problem with AD or something,
but clearly, I didn't really understand it.

I'm trying hard to convince folks that the teachers we're training
need to be exposed to Linux and OSS in general.  I "won" and got a
pretty nice server.  I lost because it looks like I'm going to be
sysadmin, at least in the short term.  (I'm a Doctor of Philosophy,
Jim, not a sysadmin!  Sysadmins make more money, or did when I started
grad school.)  Worst case I can punt & let our admin install XP on it
and use it as a file server, but I'd rather not.

The other thing that I'll need to figure out is the best way to have
clients connect.  I'm inclined to have folks use VNC.  I don't control
the network, which makes DCHP and thin clients troublesome & I'm not
sure I trust letting random clients connect via NFS.  Is there a
better solution than VNC?  What about that NX thing?
-- 
Jay Pfaffman                           <pfaffman at utk.edu>
Asst Professor of Instructional Technology, U. TN, Knoxville
Experimenting with gmail, please honor the Reply-To




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