[K12OSN] need help scaling LTSP: setting up Winbind and LDAP

john lists.john at gmail.com
Thu Apr 5 21:20:17 UTC 2007


Hi all,

I really need advice on scaling our LTSP installation. I hope you'll bear
with me as I ask this rather lengthy question. Your advice and comments will
be invaluable to me!

Here's some background:

I've installed three LTSP test servers, at three different schools in our
district. These schools are all located on a square mile campus and
connected via a multi-mode fiber back-haul. Together the LTSP servers
support 30 thin clients, which are available to the 1600 kids across our
small school district. The response has been very positive. I've been given
the go-ahead to scale the project up, replacing as many as 20or 30
additional aging fat clients per school.

Our authentication is provided via Active Directory on Windows 2003 and
currently we provide storage for students on a windows based file-server.
My intention is to keep student account management on AD since we'll
continue to support a certain segment of windows fat clients which need to
authenticate to AD. Because we use group policies to manage our windows
clients, it doesn't' seem feasible to create a new student domain on a linux
box running samba.

My goal is to move our students away from windows based file storage
completely and to centralize  the winbind.tdb so that it can handle linux to
windows uid/gid mapping for all students in the district. I think these
goals go hand in hand, since its my understanding that multiple linux file
servers, require a single winbind database in order to keep the uid/gid
mapping consistent.

I am pretty sure that I want to do this by storing my winbind user/pass data
on a central ldap server since I see that winbind/SAMBA can use a LDAP
backend. I am trying to figure out where and how to start thinking about
this. I am not even sure if this is incredibly complex or really
straight-forward.


1) Has anyone on this list done something similar

2) If so how successfully? Using what resources etc?

3) I DO need to migrate the current windows directory tree holding student
work to a new linux file server. Perhaps it would be as easy as using xcopy
or robocopy? But how would I automagically make my linux/samba users own the
contents of their migrated directories?

4) I've seen http://wiki.ltsp.org/twiki/bin/view/Ltsp/LDAP
http://www.majen.net/smbldap/ and
http://www.vcsvikings.org/docuwiki/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/
am I on the right track?

Many thanks in advance. I await your replies with bated breath!

John
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