[K12OSN] directory server for authenticating LTSP clients

[Steven McCoy]

Hello,

I have created an appliance called miru directory server that can be
installed on a generic PC or embedded system like PC Engines WRAP.  It uses
Samba 4 TP2 ontop of FreeBSD 6.1 and is simlar to m0n0wall, FreeNAS, and
pfSense.  About a 12MB download for the entire system, a slightly larger
526MB package includes four virtual machines that can be used to demonstrate
Ubuntu LTSP server together with Ubuntu MueKow client both diskless booting
from a TFTP and DHCP server on the miru directory server appliance and all
operating system files and home directories stored on a NAS appliance, in
this demo using FreeNAS.

  http://developer.novell.com/wiki/index.php/miru_directory_server

Unfortunately I do not have a demo with K12LTSP, but RedHat Fedora can be
configured similarly to Ubuntu for administering a user database.

Its all configurable via a web interface, the Samba configuration and
databases are generated at boot from one XML configuration file which also
configures the rest of the system.  I chose Samba 4 as it should be simpler
to use than Samba 3 + OpenLDAP and more compatible than a straight NIS or
Kerberos 5 database.  All the details should be available on the wiki,
including screenshots of every web page.

Ideally it should be able to manage users who login into Windows 2003
Terminal Server as well but I do not have access to a copy and have limited
knowledge of using Microsoft Active Directory :(

One caveat with the demo, I set the default language to be Hong Kong
Cantonese, this can be easily changed with the server GDM options.

:-)

I hope this might be of use to schools and small organisations as an
alternative to running a separate server or running and configuring the user
database on the same machine as the terminal server.  The embedded server I
am using from PC Engines is a similar price to one diskless workstation,
about $200.

-- 
Steve-o
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