question about users and multiple servers

[Bikerepairmann]

To start with, I'm fairly new to linux. I migrated about seven months ago from win to lin (fedora core).

I'm involved in a wifi network. This started as a hobby network for those who can't connect to the internet with xDSL or cable. This network has grown over the last few years from 4 to 75 users. We have a server for File, mail, web & ftp running on windows. This server will migrate to 2 linux servers in the next few months (one service at a time, later if needed more servers will be added) One server wil serve the website and ftp while the other runs e-mail and fileservices.

We want to make it possible for users to have an own homepage, e-mail account, ftp site and userspace. If the user logs in (LDAP) on the fileserver, we want the user to see a few subdirectories:
* /pool (for network wide availlable files)
* /ftp (read only, www availlable files)
* /homepage (/home/<user>/public_html
* /eigenftp (own ftp like homepages)

Is this possible and what would be the best way to do this?

[sarumont]

It's quite possible. I'm not sure how I would go about this as I've never done it, but I'll give you some pointers off the top of my head. First off, OpenLDAP is your man. Now as far as the user setup goes, make sure all your permissions are tight. Don't let normal users read/execute things that they will never need (or shouldn't use). Keeping everything they need in their /home/<user>/ and chrooting them to this would be the best way, IMHO.

Well...I can't think of anything else right now, but if I do I'll be sure to throw out some suggestions. Hope this helps!

[john_cruz]

For their own home page, there should be some scripts that will set up the apache config files as appropriate for each user.

[Giro]

Maybe Apache's mod_userdir and mod_autoindex would help?

[Bikerepairmann]

I forgot to mention that I have a testserver, PII-400, set up as LAMP server with FC3 and is running as webserver and ftp server with the possibillity for homepages. I started with it some four weeks ago.

It has not been configured with LDAP at this moment, only the standard login (DES I thought).

So if the first server arrives, the website, homedirectories and ftp services should be online in no-time.
It's when the second linux server goes up, we have to combine some directories on both servers into one 'virtual' directory for the user.

[GoldenEye]

Maybe NFS is the solution for you.

With a good server connection, 1000Mbps between the two servers, you wil have a nice access to the files in the remote server using nfs exported file systems.

[Bikerepairmann]

I've been thinking about NFS too, but not deeply enough.

If I'm correct,
that would be linking the /home from the fileserver to the webserver.
That way we only have to have one userdirectory on one server.

[Bikerepairmann]

Anyone interested in discussing this to get a working solution?
maybe even put a how-to together to help others with similar questions.

I've also been lokking at groupware (phpgroupware) but it's not exactly what I seek.

[cvncpu]

i would strongly suggest you find a nice distro for your severs, Fedora Core is nice for a desktop, but is indeed bloated (IMO). Try Debian, or FreeBSD, or if you have the guts, you can go for a very very nice server distro like gentoo (good for about anything)

these distros are much more suited for running a server. remeber this is just my opion, so don't go crazy if you think im wrong, after all, im just a noob

[Bikerepairmann]

Fedora Core is indeed bloated, but you don't have to install everything.
Besides, diskspace isn't expensive anymore (69 eurocent/GB), so a few gig's more or less isn't the problem.
The web/ftp server will get about 200GB diskspace while the file/mailserver will get about 750GB.
Currently the server we have has 120GB for everything with 50GB free space left.