[H-GEN] Distro advice

[Harry Phillips]

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> This would mean you can do your processing on the workstations as you
> want, but it is important to know that you'll throttle the servers disks
> with a decent number of active workstations.  You'd need to put fast i/o
> on the server - eg, scsi, in order to get the best out of the setup.

I thought about that and came to a similar conclusion. As I don't have SCSI
in the server I am going to try a different option. see below

> Unix has a far superior way of storing user preferences that NT.  Profiles
> are a real hack :)

Don't I know it, I look after several networks and the profiles cause no end
of problems.

> Just make sure all workstations have an nfs mounted
> /home filesystem and all the user prefs are covered.  Since it sounds like
> nfs would do what you want anyway, this is a natural way to approach the
> problem.

That is what I am going to do. I have decided to use the following setup.

1. LDAP for login
2. nfs mount the /home to the server
3. autoupdate for updateing/installing new packages.

I am familiar with Mandrake and it seems to get recommended for the desktop
so that is what will end up on each workstation.

> Restrict root access to the boxes and (assuming no one cracks it) you keep
> control of the boxes.  There are quite a few ways of making it very
> difficult to get into a Linux box[1]
>
> [1] Apart from the obvious like keeping it fully patched, settng a lilo
> password is greay if one of your users thinks they are pretty smart.

Don't use lilo grub is my preference, you just change the map file and the
next time you startup it is there.

> Combine this with restricting booting to the HD only and putting abios
> password on and it is pretty difficult for someone to get control (short
> of opening the case the clear the bios password or removing the HD :)

I will put on a password to get into the BIOS.

Well I am off to learn about LDAP and exporting and mount nfs points.


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