My school uses Macs. They run Mac OS X Server. At each computer in the computer lab, each student is able to logon using their username and password to their "own desktop" because each computer is authenticated remotely and their home folder is a remote mount. All programs run locally.
At studentserver.myschool.org, they run an appletalk file share server, perhaps another sort of file sharing server, and an ssh server, all of which I can logon to using my username. At queenbee.myschool.org, the school runs an ldap server which is used for authentication on each of the computer lab computers. Logged in as administrator, I looked at the directory services program to obtain ldap information. They connect to the queenbee server and use the base of dn=..... Also part of this string is cn=config and it is setup to get all details "from server". All user name entries have the normal objectType=posixAccount in addition to some unique apple attributes. One of the attributes is homeFolder. For me, this is located at /Network/studentserver.myschool.org/Volumes/Hive/myUserName. Logged onto my account using a mac, in addition to my home folder being present as I have all my settings unique to me, I can type cd ~ in terminal and get my homefolder, which is mapped to this path. I can also cd /Network/studentserver.myschool.org and peak around. My authentication to this server is based on my username and the group that I'm in (which was authenticated by ldap before), so it is safe to conclude that studentserver.myschool.org also logs into this ldap server and authenticates me using normal credentials. I installed Linux on one of the G5 towers. How can I set the computer up such that users are able to login to it using their username and password and have their home folder be their server share? OpenLDAP? SSH? AFP? I have tried openldap and I have been unable to get that to work (ldapsearch -x 'uid=myusername' works but I can't get system wide authentication working). If I did get OpenLDAP to work, what about the home folder? The homeFolder attribute ldap mentions refers to a specific place already existant on the mac computer (/Networks/studentserver.myschool.org), so perhaps the equivalant would be to have /Networks/studentserver.myschool.org in /etc/fstab and mounted. The next question, however, is how can I have this mount like a normal device directory which uses normal authentication? I have tried specifying nfs as a fs type, but this does not work. Perhaps I can utilize the existance of an ssh server running? What about afp? But then I have to be careful that it uses the normal system wide authentication mechanism (that authenicates my access to local folders, for instance) and not a logon of its own. And on top of that, even after getting OpenLDAP to authenticate system wide, how will it know to make the homefolder based on the homeFolder attribute? Or perhaps there's another way to do this, completely through ssh, but that's doubtful. Any ideas? -- Jason A. Donenfeld Deep Space Explorer -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
