BSD Freak wrote:
I have an upcoming project to create a modern UNIX (mainly
FreeBSD-based) workgroup computing environment.
If _YOU_ had your chance to do it from scratch, what technologies would
you use? Basically only following are set in stone. Everything else is
up to me:
1. Centralised user/password/account management 2. 2-3 file servers running FreeBSD, 1 mail server and 1 VPN gateway
also running FreeBSD
3. Workstations will be 75% FreeBSD and 25% Mac OS X 10.2
Most people I have spoken to automatically say NIS/NFS. Although I know
that NIS/NFS is a tried and true combination, I can't help but feel
there must be a better way to do a modern BSD UNIX environment. As silly
as it may sound I am seriously thinking about running Samba for file
sharing services even though this is a fully UNIX environment.
Reasons for this include excellent performance on FreeBSD and better
security than NFS.
Some of the other authentication/account management technologies I'm
evaluating include LDAP and Kerberos. Any and comments/suggestions would
be very well received...
Basically what I'm asking is if you could do it all over from scratch
how would you do a modern BSD UNIX workgroup?
If (and it's a fairly large "if") nss_ldap was supported by FreeBSD, and if ldap authentication were supported by MacOS X, then I would go with LDAP. But 4.X doesn't support nss_ldap, and I'm not even sure if 5.x does yet. I have no clue whether MacOS X does or not. Unless I had a concern about someone sniffing my local network, I'd use NFS for file sharing. I think it's still the cleanest, even if it's not the fastest.
In the more practical sense. It's probably still best to go with NIS, as it seems to be the most supported at this time. I still like NFS for file-sharing, although SMB is a viable option. YMMV -- Bill Moran Potential Technologies http://www.potentialtech.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
