Xen - Centralized logon for all domU's

Question

I'm part of a small business who is curently renting a dedicated server running Xen (Debian) with 4 Debian guests.

Dom0 = eon
DomU-1 = fry - build server
DomU-2 = get - development env
DomU-3 = hal - production env
DomU-4 = ion - sandbox

At the moment I have 5 ip-adresses, and the Dom0 plus the DomU's currently have one IP each. Each of the DomU's have its own task as you can see from the list I wrote. Now, what I would like is an easier way to configure access to the domU's independently than having to configure user accounts (via e.g. useradd) on each of the boxes for each of the users. I would also like, if possible, to set up a samba-share on one of the domU's for storing documents and the like.

Would VPN cover this and if so; is it possible to setup VPN so that only traffic directed to the dedicated server passes through VPN (I want to avoid spending bandwidth on regular surfing if a user forget to close the VPN connection)?

Any tips on where to start would be of great help.

Answer 1

Centralized authentication/authorization (e.g. AD/LDAP or even shudder NIS). You should be able to NFS mount some fileserver space between all of the dom0s as well as domUs. The dom0 could even have an IP alias that could be on the same subnet as all of the domUs I suppose.