A lot's been going on at home lately,
Candace and her brood are coming to live with me and my daughter. We're doing piles of construction in the basement to get bedrooms built. We're all excited and working hard to get stuff done this summer. More importantly though, it is now normal for there to be five computers in my living room (none of which are really meant for my use any more, but that's beside the point). Any of six residents can be in the house at any given time. There are also cases where we might log in remotely: for email, SSH access or a couple other web applications that I run on one of the machines like a wiki and calendar. Then there's
Asterisk, which I haven't had up lately but desperately want to get back online.
Background - Many to Many Too Many
Obviously we need to have some common file storage locations and control for access to those locations. So I've decided to look more seriously into setting up LDAP. Currently one of the machines dual boots Windows XP and OpenSuse 10.2. Another one (that I use for a Myth TV front end) runs OpenSuse 10.1. My desktop is full-time OpenSuse 10.2 for now, though I might be pressed to also install Windows Vista soon (resisting with all my might). Let's see... that leaves the two laptops. They run Windows XP. Oh, I almost forgot about the old DOS box I put in the garage to run the CNC. I'll not worry about it for the moment.
I want all the computers to be usable by all the residents. I like to have storage private by default but very easily sharable. It's very easy to make user accounts for everyone on each of the Linux boxes. It's also very easy to do on the Windows machines.
The Linux Machines
I have a feeling that the Linux boxes could just be configured to use an NFS mounted directory for /home and that would be a quick way to get everyone's stuff available wherever they log on from. The thing is, there are some things that go in /home by default that are machine-specific. So I need to have a separation between user settings and user-created documents. I noticed on my Suse machines that I get a /home/rob4/Documents folder. I don't know if it's KDE-specific but I think I'm going to look in to the details of why that folder exists. It seems like it would be a simple matter to use that folder for user-created content and let all the dot-files that get created in /home/rob4 continue to live happily as per-machine files. I doubt that's perfect but I think applications could maybe be managed by exception - that is, configure programs to move things out of /home/userid only as-needed.
The approach of using /home/userid/Documents this way would then require something like a network-shared directory that contains all the different user document folders.
| Server | Client |
|---|
| /userdocs | /mnt/userdocs |
| /userdocs/user1 | /home/user1/Documents -> /mnt/userdocs/user1 |
| /userdocs/user2 | /home/user2/Documents -> /mnt/userdocs/user2 |
| ... | | ... |
| /userdocs/userN | /home/userN/Documents -> /mnt/userdocs/userN |
Each user's Documents folder would be a link to the NFS-mounted /userdocs folder. I think this would be a pretty good first attempt. It's a bother though that it wouldn't keep per-application setting changes across machines, but config files have to be looked at on a case-by-case basis. Some could keep machine-specific or application version-specific info that would break when read on a different machine. Worse, a user could have the same application open on two machines simultaneously. The application makes changes to a setting that's stored in a dot-file then those could be clobbered by the other instance with unpredictable results.
The Windows Machines
I know that users can have roaming profiles on Windows XP but I don't know which editions of Windows get all the features and which ones have arbitrary networking features disabled. I'll have to look in to it. In the most basic case though it should be pretty easy to map a Samba shared drive for each user that points to their network file storage location. Then I can stick a shortcut to that in the My Documents folder and add it to the short list of locations that shows up in most open and save dialogs.
Logins
Without having really read a whole lot about it, I'm hoping that running an OpenLDAP server on one of the machines should allow me to create user IDs that can be reused across operating systems and as a single signon or at least single password for most of the web applications I run. I'm almost positive the basic user account logins are doable in Windows and Linux. I know that some web applications are already aware of LDAP and can be configured to use it. Others might just need a shim but I know there are interfaces from PHP to LDAP. Currently I use basic htaccess authentication generally but I'd like to move to something more uniform.
So far I just have hopes but I'm going to dig in to the
Quick-Start Guide from OpenLDAP and hope for the best.
