Setting Up Network Users on Ubuntu Server

Question

Probably a very n00bish question; however, I'm a n00b at networking and ubuntu. ;)

Anyways, I currently have 4 ubuntu client computers running in 12.04 and one ubuntu server. I have set up 6 users on the server and I want to extend the accessibility of these users on the client computers. I would like for a user to log in on a client computer with a user defined by the server. Once logged in, the local home directory can be matched up with the server home directory for that user. This seems like such a common task; however, I cannot find much on this unfortunately.

Answer 1

This is a well-documented set of processes and some perusal of Ubuntu's own website will define what you need to do. In short, you want to centralize the administration of user ID's, passwords, etc in an LDAP directory and set up autofs to allow a given user's directory to be mounted from a central file server whenever they log into a given client machine.

The client machine setup is laid out here while the server setup is here. The overall Ubuntu server administration guide is also excellent, as found here. This last resource covers not only network logins and such but also a huge number of other common tasks. It's a good reference and the Ubuntu people put a lot of work into it.