[K12OSN] need help scaling LTSP: setting up Winbind and LDAP

Steven Santos steven at simplycircus.com
Fri Apr 6 01:30:43 UTC 2007


Lots of ways to go with this question.  Lets start by gathering more info;

Can you tell us more about the current computing enviornment on campus?
- How many, and of what type (mac, win, unix, other) are the computers you
have?
- Do you have a managed or unmanaged network? Can you do vLANS?
- Do you currently spread your servers out, or are they centralized?

Can you tell us more about where your planning to go?
- Do you plan a mass migration to an all or mostly linux enviornment?
- Are you planning on having multi-media (Mac/Lin/Win fat clients?)





----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----

Steven Santos
Director, Simply Circus, Inc.
Email: Steven at SimplyCircus.com
 Mail: 14 Pierrepont Road
       Newton, MA 02462
Phone: 617-527-0667
  Web: www.SimplyCircus.com

  -----Original Message-----
  From: k12osn-bounces at redhat.com [mailto:k12osn-bounces at redhat.com]On
Behalf Of john
  Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2007 5:20 PM
  To: Support list for open source software in schools.
  Subject: [K12OSN] need help scaling LTSP: setting up Winbind and LDAP


  Hi all,

  I really need advice on scaling our LTSP installation. I hope you'll bear
with me as I ask this rather lengthy question. Your advice and comments will
be invaluable to me!

  Here's some background:

  I've installed three LTSP test servers, at three different schools in our
district. These schools are all located on a square mile campus and
connected via a multi-mode fiber back-haul. Together the LTSP servers
support 30 thin clients, which are available to the 1600 kids across our
small school district. The response has been very positive. I've been given
the go-ahead to scale the project up, replacing as many as 20or 30
additional aging fat clients per school.

  Our authentication is provided via Active Directory on Windows 2003 and
currently we provide storage for students on a windows based file-server.
My intention is to keep student account management on AD since we'll
continue to support a certain segment of windows fat clients which need to
authenticate to AD. Because we use group policies to manage our windows
clients, it doesn't' seem feasible to create a new student domain on a linux
box running samba.

  My goal is to move our students away from windows based file storage
completely and to centralize  the winbind.tdb so that it can handle linux to
windows uid/gid mapping for all students in the district. I think these
goals go hand in hand, since its my understanding that multiple linux file
servers, require a single winbind database in order to keep the uid/gid
mapping consistent.

  I am pretty sure that I want to do this by storing my winbind user/pass
data on a central ldap server since I see that winbind/SAMBA can use a LDAP
backend. I am trying to figure out where and how to start thinking about
this. I am not even sure if this is incredibly complex or really
straight-forward.


  1) Has anyone on this list done something similar

  2) If so how successfully? Using what resources etc?

  3) I DO need to migrate the current windows directory tree holding student
work to a new linux file server. Perhaps it would be as easy as using xcopy
or robocopy? But how would I automagically make my linux/samba users own the
contents of their migrated directories?

  4) I've seen http://wiki.ltsp.org/twiki/bin/view/Ltsp/LDAP
  http://www.majen.net/smbldap/ and
http://www.vcsvikings.org/docuwiki/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/
  am I on the right track?

  Many thanks in advance. I await your replies with bated breath!

  John


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/k12osn/attachments/20070405/4b43f753/attachment.htm>


More information about the K12OSN mailing list