On Fri, 2002-07-05 at 03:13, Scott Bower wrote: > Okay, > > Let me start with this 'What If': > > Let's say I work as a WAN Engineer with a particularly prominent > Government Department and have been able to garner enough interest with > the hierarchy (and a good handful of co-horts) to pilot a project Linux > Workstation replacement for the current Windows NT Workstation S.O.E > Let's also say that I have the go ahead for a Proof-of-Concept > presentation on how well it could be integrated given this could be > offered as a potential replacement for the average Shmo' Productivity > Worker. > This possible environment would look something like this, a > homogenous environment running a locked-down Windows NT 4 Desktop with > Roaming Profiles running various productivity software including Lotus > Notes, Microsoft Office and Outlook, Visio, etc. authenticating to > Windows 2000 Servers sporting Exchange and Terminal Services... > > Savvy as I might be with Linux, I'll be treading new ground in various > areas of emulating basic actions of NT in Domain Logon, Dynamic CIFS > Resource mapping, Roaming Profiles (can that be done?) and population of > Desktop and Menu items for equivalent productivity software. > > I'm aware of the application support which recently boasts ver. 1.0 of > everything (i.e. StarOffice/OpenOffice.org, Ximian Evolution/Connector, > Codeweaver's Crossover, etc, etc.) so this area is well covered. What > I'm hoping I can get help with is: > > 1 - is there a way to emulate the more intrinsic characteristics of the > NT S.O.E. lockdown features including some sort of parsing emulation of > the 'netlogon.bat', I read somewhere that Samba 2.2.2 allowed a Windows > Domain Logon at a Linux Workstation (!!!ESPECIALLY!!! Want to get docs > on This!) and > > 2 - is there a way to present network resources and automounting > floppys/CD's in a similar manner as a regular NT desktop > > 3 - is there somewhere I can read up on idiot proofing Linux so that > changes would only stick to their NT Roaming Profile (...again, if this > could be done) and not to the system.
I'm not sure of everything your looking for, but the most common solution to these types of issues in the Unix world is to have all the work-stations be very basic and locked down PCs... you may look into having them boot remotely from a boot server (this makes maintenance a lot easier, but it creates a boatload of network traffic). Red Hat also supports automated network installs using 'kickstart', so that is another option. Each of the workstations would use DHCP to get an IP address, default route, and nameserver addresses. It would also use NIS (also known as yellow pages/YP) so that they get username/password info from the master server. These workstations can be super cheap PC's. The smallest hard-drive you can buy with around 64MB of memory. You just have to make sure all their hardware is supported. Then, you get a fairly good sized server to handle the workgroup. It will be the NIS/YP server, and it will have the /home partition for everyone. When someone logs into a workstation, the PC will mount that user's home directory through the network (using a combination of NIS and the automounter)... so their home directory follows them around. On the server, depending on the budget you should look into SCSI drives and RAID. Big and fast with loads of memory, and a decent network controller. It's hard to explain it all in one e-mail, but it's not as difficult as it might seem to setup. This scheme is a good 10 years old. Just look at the various HOW-TOs for: DHCPD, NIS/YP, and automount/NFS Also, there are system wide 'login batch files' which get executed. However, they're usually located on the local machine in /etc. You would need to come up with some solution to the problem of automatically distributing updates to the file or maybe make them symlinks to versions which reside on NFS. Hope that is what you were wanting to hear. -- Steve Borho Voice: 314-439-8342 Member of Technical Staff Celox Networks Inc http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1925.txt
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