How to Set Up Network Profile Sharing/Single Sign On

Question

I guess this would be the appropriate place to ask this sort of question. At university, our IT staff has set up network profiles, where you can use the same login credentials to gain access to any school-run computer terminal. The school supports both Windows and Mac OS, so we can use the same credentials for each.

At work, my bosses would like to set up something similar, where each desktop there can be accessed using the same login credentials. They use all Apple iMac computers, with a small development server in-house which runs Arch Linux.

My question is this: is there a guide out there or some easy way to set up network profile sharing or single sign-on capabilities? It would be nice to use anyone's computer to get the job done, or if we have guests to allow them to login and allow them to get their work done. Thank you for any and all answers!

Answer 1

This is not going to be trivial. You need to set up a directory service (e.g. Active Directory, Open Directory, eDirectory etc.) to centrally store the identities, then you configure the clients to authenticate against this. But like I said it's not trivial, it requires a lot of planning and maintenance.

Have a look at any one of the links returned from this quick search to give you an idea of what's involved.