[Samba] school PDC questions

[Ken D'Ambrosio]

Ivo Dancet wrote:

> I need to set up a samba server (I think samba 3.0.2 will be the one) 
> as PDC for my school. It needs to serve mandatory profiles, home dirs, 
> shares, printers. As OS I think redhat will do just fine (or isn't 
> that a good idea?). Authentication would use openLDAP (if I get it 
> online with the hints of realx).

While I use Debian, there's certainly nothing wrong with using Red Hat.

>
> Questions:
> 1. What hardware will do a fine job to do this?

You neglect to give any hint as to how many users.  Obviously, the more 
users, the
beefier a system.

> 2. Can a webserver run on the same server without problems or is it 
> better to have another server to serve pages (html, php, mysql) for 
> intranet and 'claroline' (an online learning environment).

Certainly nothing against it, but, again, if you're stretching your 
hardware's limitations, it would probably be best to have it on a 
separate system.

> 3. and something else: is it easy to add users in bulk to that 
> openldap server (with home dir and so)?

If you're familiar with Perl (or sed/awk, Python, etc.), once you 
understand the underlying principles of LDAP, and LDIF files, creation 
of users becomes trivial.

> A few early questions, I'm sure a lot will folow, even though I read a 
> lot of info...

We all have to start somewhere; that's what lists like this are for.

Ken D'Ambrosio
Sr. SysAdmin,
Xanoptix, Inc.