Re: [TCLUG:3463] Can linux do this?

[Christopher Palmer <reid@pconline.com>]

On Sat, 16 Jan 1999, Ben Luey wrote:

> Have one server that has all users/passwords stored. When you logon to any
> computer on the network it does a remote login with the server. This
> should include the root account and the passwords should be sent in some
> secure fassion. The linux workstations would have /home and maybe /usr
> mounted remotely and have permissions work with the remote logins. Again,
> the mounting should be secure. Sychronization with files: Ex: /bin and
> /lib would be on every computer but once a day they would check the server
> for newer versions. This way you could update a package on one computer
> and have it go to the other computers (update package on a workstation, if
> all goes well, copy it to the server and then have the workstations do an
> update on their directories)

NFS and NIS (aka YP). SAMBA, if the server is NT. We use NFS/NIS in the
ACM lab, with exactly the situation you describe.

> Optional: run a program on a workstation and have it run off the server
> and send the display to the workstation without telneting to the server
> (you have already logged on via the workstation logon) 

X Windows was born to do this. Read 'man X' and look for the '-query'
option. It'll eat up your bandwidth, but as someone else said, there is a
compression scheme available to make this less of a problem.

> Optional: Share cpu / processing power of the linux computers (act
> like a cluster) when network bandwidth is available.

Now you're talking about a real-live cluster, or a distributed OS like
Plan 9. :^) That's probably more than you want to take on, or need to.

> Is this were possible, it would be great for setting up of linux
> workstations on old hardware with small harddrives and basically only have
> to administer one computer. If the workstations were the same hardware,
> you could do the automatic update on the kernel to (have to run lilo on
> each computer, but still). Also just backup the server and you have the
> whole network backed-up.

Someone posted a URL about turning old PCs into X terminals, it was a very
detailed set of pages. Unfortunately, I can't find that URL anymore. :'(
Again, though, 'X -query <server hostname>' will get you just what you
want. The URL I wish I could find went into more complicated detail (lots
of configuration goodies), but doing an X query is easy enough.

_____________________________________________________________________________
Christopher Reid Palmer : reid@pconline.com : www.pconline.com/~reid/