Edu Laptops and terminal servers

[Veli-Matti Lintu]

su, 2010-09-05 kello 14:45 +0200, Mattias Hemmingsson kirjoitti:
> So i have an edu network with some edu servers in an ltsp cluster.
> all connected with ldap users and home folders over nfs.
> This is working so nice with the server and my laptops when the laptops are in my network.
> 
> But now i would like to have the teatchers to have their own laptops ant to take them home.
> But how do i solved the problem with caching upp the users and passwords when the laptop is not connected.
> And how can i sync the file system when the laptop is back in the system ?

Hi,

We have laptops in similar school environments and there are quite a few
ways to deal with this. For authentication we have tested e.g.
pam_ccreds+nss_updatedb, custom http-based authentication and sssd.

I personally never managed to get pam_ccreds stable enough for real use,
but it's my understanding that it's working nicely in some big
environments. sssd is a newer project, but it's working nicely together
with our kerberos environments. It caches the user information so that
laptops can be used even when there's no network connection for longer
periods. There's a posting about sssd in our blog:

http://www.opinsys.fi/en/user-management-with-sssd-on-shared-laptops

Synchronizing user files can be done in many ways. One could use Ubuntu
One or Dropbox or something similar and just sync everything to the
cloud. For direct syncing in user-space there's at least Unison:

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

Veli-Matti