Re: Networking Workstations

Jeremy,

You are asking for a couple of things.  Distributed authentication on the 
*NIX world is spelled NIS.   The commands all start with the two letters
'yp' as the original name was 'Yellow Pages' but that is all history.  
NIS (and the follow-on called NIS+ which is fading from sight) provide
or centralized administration of information, e.g., users, groups, hosts,
etc.  Best to read the HOWTO's and understand what it provides, and
does not provide.  Distributed filesystems in the *NIX world generally
means NFS.  Your user home directories can be on a file server and the
appropriate directories automounted on the workstations when the users
login.  Information on what to automount can be distributed via NIS
maps.  This is all fairly common, and standard, in the *NIX world and
has been for some time.

There are alternatives you might consider.  Kerberos is a good 
alternative, and in fact MS has tried to move away from DC's to a
Kerberos based system with proprietary extensions.  That facility was
released on the world with Win2K but has not gained traction in a DC
centric WinTel world.  Another alternative to consider is LDAP
authentication.  Both Kerberos (standard, without MS extensions) and
LDAP are attractive in that they are OS-agnostic; they can work with
any OS and have no direct link to any specific one.  So you could
have an LDAP authentication engine in a mixed WinTel/*NIX world.

Look at the alternatives, but the easiest is NIS + NFS; it is also the
most problematic from a security standpoint.  

- rick -

On Wed, 19 Mar 2003, Jeremy Watkins wrote:

> I am fairly new to networking in Linux. Its there a way to do centralized authentication and profiles (ie. like Microsoft DC's). So that when user's are at the login screen they are actually typing in their info and then it is being processed by the server, mapping out their home drives on the server and setting up their profile (all info stored on the server).  Any help would be great!