XFreeRollerX

I'm looking for recommendations on central management software... Something similar to what Novell Clients do for local settings but with a remote management...


Basically I need something that I can have on 1 computer/server that hosts all the info, files, etc...
When clients log in with usernames or something, and it pulls their settings and files to the local computer (OR just sets their local directorys for saving to go to the server).....

Basically so that my clients can work on 1 workstation.. if that station breaks/goes down/ moves, they can log into a new computer, and all their documents will be brought right back to their new station.


I've been recomended Webmin for this, but I'm not sure where to start yet (I'm still reading documentation)

Im also very new to Unix/Linux operation - just started playing with Linux Mint 7 on my laptop in the past 3 months

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evermooingcow

Open LDAP or to a lesser degree NIS with NFS for network mounted roaming profiles. Distros like OpenSUSE have GUI configurations for these so the basic setup will probably not be too bad depending on what distro you will be running.

BLinux

are your client machines also Linux/Unix based or are you talking about Windows based clients?

If Unix/Linux based, you can setup a NFS share to host home directories and have the client machines use automount to automatically mount their home dirs when they login. You'll need a way to keep all the uid/gid stuff unique and consistent, so you'll need to centralize account management with something like LDAP, NIS+, NIS, Kerberos, or another option is to manage the /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow file via configuration management tools (like cfengine or puppet) from one central "master" /etc/passwd+shadow file. The last option has the advantage that if the client machine is disconnected from the network or the auth server goes down, you can still login (but NFS home dirs might not be accessible if you're off the network).

if you're talking about Windows based clients, you'll need to use Samba to host user profile directories via SMB/CIFS. www.samba.org has plenty of documentation and examples of how to do this.

BLinux

just re-read your post and noticed you're new to Linux/Unix. if what you're trying to do is to set this up for some organization and/or business that needs this to be stable, I highly recommend that you use an enterprise grade Linux distro like CentOS.