managing a small network - 2 newbie questions

[prtc]

hello,

i've been an intermediate-level linux user for some years, and now i'm supposed to set up and manage a small network for our research group.

we have 5 linux boxes with ubuntu 10.04 (actually i'm installing everything we need in one box and will attempt to clone the others with clonezilla). i've 2 questions:

1) i'd like to manage all user accounts from one pc (server? so to say), so that every user can log in any of the 5 machines with the same passwd etc. what is the best/easiest/most stable application/protocol to manage this?

2) is it possible to create a network logical volume, based on the individual HDs and visible to all boxes? something like a RAID0 over ethernet? any suggestion of protocol/application?

many thx.

[gnuuser]

centos
pclinuxos
both of these have great server programs
but if you are using ubuntu then use
ubuntu server editions
you should have no problems with it
and set up samba if connecting a windows machine to it
the best way to manage the server though is through using remote call procedures.

direct accessing the server can lead to too many errors or inadvertent failure of a file system
if you are using a pc for a file server just share the drives
and for better performance install the maximum amount of ram that your motherboard can support.
( a fast network can easily be bogged down by a slow server)
yes you also can share drives on a server depending on how the raid is configured.
but it is not generally recommended usually the folders are shared with limited access (password protection)

my network server is set up bank 0 raid (striped) and bank 1 raid is mirrored to bank 0.
bank 0 has the folders and backups for each machine on the network
as each user runs backup or transfers files the info is backed up to the server and mirrored on raid 1
this gives us great error correction.

[linuxaria]

hello,


we have 5 linux boxes with ubuntu 10.04 (actually i'm installing everything we need in one box and will attempt to clone the others with clonezilla). i've 2 questions:

First consideration, to keep it easy use on all PC the same distribution, if you know Ubuntu and are fine with it..install ubuntu on all of 5 PC.

1) i'd like to manage all user accounts from one pc (server? so to say), so that every user can log in any of the 5 machines with the same passwd etc. what is the best/easiest/most stable application/protocol to manage this?

The easiest solution that come to my mind is anopenldap server that work as central authentication point, there should be plenty of how to on how to do that.

The con are that you have to keep always that PC on and openldap working (but this should not be a big problem), you should study how to backup the information in openldap (doing for example ldif dump every X hours), and be ready to set up a backup ldap server if the first fail (that could be a HA solution, or maybe a replicated serevr, openldap has good solution for this).

Also keep some lcoal account on every PC (root, admin, emergency ?) so you can still login if the openldap fail.

2) is it possible to create a network logical volume, based on the individual HDs and visible to all boxes? something like a RAID0 over ethernet? any suggestion of protocol/application?
many thx.

You are asking for http: / / www,drbd,org, DRBD, to make it short you can use a raid 1 hard disk over ethernet, so you have 1 disk on a PC and the second on another.

Post here if you need more info.

Bye

[prtc]

great help. thank you both.