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

[Rob Owens]

I don't have an answer, but I'm contemplating a similar setup to your
proposed one.  My question is:  If you authenticate to Active Directory,
how do students using Linux workstations change their passwords?

-Rob

On Thu, Apr 05, 2007 at 02:20:17PM -0700, john  wrote:
> 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

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