[mjb]

I've been given the invitation to advise a bunch of Unix sysadmins as to how to better integrate a lab of ( about 20) G3s and G4s into their network as a small engineering and research college.

We'd like to allow any of our 1500 users to login with their current username and password (currently kept in a standard encrypted file on a slackware-based bunch of servers), have their NFS account "/u/username" mount upon login, and have their mac-app preferences (email, bookmarks, word prefs, desktop picture) to be saved and restored upon login again on any of the macs.

Can the OS X 1.2 package (with Netboot, Apple Network Assistant, Macintosh Manager, etc) do this easily - either with the packaged software and/or with free/OSS additions/hacks to the server?

I'm more familiar with OS X PB and classic MacOS and something of a mid-level user with LinuxPPC (and other things Unix-like including OS X PB's core)... I'm not clear on how different of a beast OS X Server is, and exactly how to "mirror" or exchange things like the password file across unices. I'm acting as a "liason" from the Mac community here.

[This message has been edited by mjb (edited 01-23-2001).]

[geordie]

It is not possible to do what you want under the current version of server. Macintosh Manager would allow you to have the preferences follow the user but making it work with an NFS mount for a Mac home directory is going to be difficult or perhaps impossible. Using the Unix crypted passwords is not going to work either. Server 2.0 could probably more easily be made to do these things but depending how your current servers share login information even that would probably not be simple .

While this may not be what you are exactly looking for, but if all of the Macs are on OSX then they will easily be able to pull user information from either an NIS or NetInfo server, most likely NIS in your case, this can be set up using NetInfoManager on OSX or by using some of the OSX freeware utilities to do this. Check some of the forums for more information. This will also allow you to set the users home directory on another machine and NFS mount it on the mac.

OSX server 2.0 or whatever they are going to call it should facilitate this a little bit. You can check out the white paper on Apple's web site.