There's a Windows network of about 60 workstations I am going to be responsible for. The network is in a terrible mess, so I decided to rebuild it from the ground up. Currently, there are some Windows Server installations running, one of which takes the role of a Primary Domain Controller (PDC). I do not have any experience with Windows domains, so I would like to run Debian servers instead.
So I started looking for tools that would allow me to use Debian as PDC. It seems that Samba can take care of central authentication and authorization of users.
I have rewritten this post several times and settled on the following list of services I need, put in simple words:
I need to tell who can do what on the workstations. I believe that this is called Local Policy Management in the Windows world.
I need to share printers and files over the network.
I need to keep a list of users and their groups somewhere. I would like to be able to tell that "users who belong to group G have the following set of rights".
As we are a high school, there are hundreds of accounts created every few months and hundreds are deleted at the same time. If I could store all this information about users, groups and permissions in MySQL tables, that would be great.
I would like to be able to specify which scripts should run after the user has logged in, on a per-user basis (to map network folders, to connect printers and the like).
I need to run some elementary network security, such as Radius, and a PXE boot server that will provide different installation images for different machines based on their MAC address.
Samba seems to be a full-blown alternative to the Windows PDC and I do not quite like that. Would it be possible to use Samba with, for example, pGina? Is there any way to force Samba to read information about users and groups from a MySQL database? How do I use Samba to enforce Local Policy Management?
I know this is a lot of questions, but I am not looking for complete answers. I would love to get some basic overview of how these - very common, I believe - requirements can be met.
Thanks a lot!