[clug] desktop administration tools on linux [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

[Alex Satrapa]

On 20 Dec 2006, at 10:06, Robert Edwards wrote:

> The main traditional way to do this was using Sun Network File System
> (NFS)  ... For a "mixed environment", you need to look at Samba  
> instead of NFS
> and Samba PDC/BDC etc.

I'm not sure of the state of the art at the moment, but when using  
NFS you can mount a remote volume and preserve permissions. Using  
SMBFS all permissions are squashed to the person mounting the drive  
(from the point of view of the server).

If anyone knows how to mount a remote volume using SMBFS but still  
maintain users/groups/access rights, I'd love to know how its' done.

>> Something like OpenLDAP or FC directory server spring to mind, but do
>> they allow one to store user settings like backgrounds, skins and  
>> much
>> more importantly rights to various workstations as part of the  
>> profile.

Backgrounds, skins, etc are stored by Windows as part of the user  
profile. Samba handles this just fine. For Linux, they're stored in  
the users' home directories. Either way, whichever machine you log  
into will become just as broken.. sorry, I mean customised... as the  
last one.

>> And is it possible to make global manipulations to these rules, eg
>> anyone in a group called "users" does not have permissions to install
>> software on the local PC.

We usually do that the other way around - only allow people in the  
group "Administrators" the right to install software.

>> I believe Novell ZENWorks and Xandros Desktop Management do something
>> similar on linux, but they are not really open source and I am not  
>> sure
>> if they work cross platform.  So has anyone heard of such a beast  
>> and would care to share the
>> experience :)

That could be interesting, managing themes cross-platform so that you  
can never tell whether you're actually running on Linux or Windows...

Alex