[K12OSN] silly ldap questions

Quentin Hartman qhartman at lane.k12.or.us
Tue Mar 28 15:53:20 UTC 2006


Peter Hartmann wrote:
> Forgive me if these are silly questions, but I'm trying to figure out
> the possible different ways that people implement smb/ldap with ltsp.

There are many ways to do this, it's taken me awhile to settle on a setup
that works for me.

>  Do people tend to have their smb/ldap machines also be file servers
> for /home?

You certainly can, and this is probably the easiest way to set things up.
I like to have multiple DNS names point at the same machine, one for each
service. That way, I can seperate those services out on to other machines
if I need to without reconfiguring everything.

 Will one machine suffice in that configuration or should
> one have a backup domain controller?

It depends on how many computers you are going to be supporting, and how
much downtime is acceptible to you. The Samba folks make _very_
conservative suggestions with regard to how many computers should be
supported by one PDC. I seem to recall suggestions in the ballpark of 50
per auth server. I am currently running several hundred from one auth/file
server and performance seems fine. Note though that this server is _not_
doing ltsp, samba, dhcp, and ldap.

Does anyone keep dedicated
> machines just for authentication and is that possible?

Yes some people do this and it is possible. You can create LDAP slaves who
replicate from the master server. The official samba howto and "by
example" books go into this. www.samba.org

  With a single
> ltsp server, wouldn't that involve smb or nfs mounting /home back on
> the ltsp server and for linux terminal sessions would the server
> 'know' that it was actually hosting /home and not bother to use the
> network for file access or would there be some network overhead in
> doing it that way.

I'm not quite sure I'm following your logic here, so please correct any
incorrect assumptions I'm making. It sounds like you have everything
(ltsp, samba, ldap, dhcp, etc.) all running on the same server. Is that
correct? If so, then, no there is not any sort of network mounting that
needs to happen. If you mean that you have home directories on one server
and LTSP on another, then yes, an nfs mount is needed. The server doesn't
care where or how /home is connected. If there is a remote network drive
mounted there, it  uses that, if there isn't, it doesn't. I have a
presentation I did on LTSP up at http://www.slane.k12.or.us/index.pl/oss .
There is a diagram of my setup about 3/4 of the way through it that might
help illustrate things for you.

-- 
-Regards-

Quentin Hartman
Technology Coordinator
South Lane School District
Cottage Grove, Oregon
V (541)767-3778
F (541)767-3041
www.slane.k12.or.us




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