What is a good for networked Linux computers?

Question

Ok, this may be a bit of a complicated problem, but I'll try to simplify it as much as possible. We are on a University Campus network, and I am working for a professor who wants to setup at least 3 new computers to 4 which are already existing. So I'd like to know what you all think the best way to setup these computers to work together is. Below are the requirements:

• One computer will share the data (it has 1TB HDD)
• The other computers will regularly be accessing and editing the data directly, so a mounted file system (NFS, SSHFS, etc) may be needed (SVN or CVS is not an option as it needs to be easy for the users and professor).
• All computers should be capable of being used to do calculations (full use of processor/ram).

The issues I am wondering specifically about is making the shared files private enough so that only the authorized people can access it, while not having to manually make sure that all UIDs, GIDs, etc are the same across all computers (which is the current setup using NFS). Ideally any user should be able to use any computer and have the same environment, but this is not a requirement. Currently, the computers are running Fedora (not sure which version) and Ubuntu, one 8.04 and the other 9.04. If you have a recommendation of a specif OS which makes this task easy, then I would like to hear it, otherwise I am thinking of converting all of them into Ubuntu 9.04 as it is what I am the most familiar with.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

NIS is very simple to set up and integrates identities across unix or linux machines. Conceptually, it works by 'exporting' various files such as /etc/passwd or /etc/shadow (and various others). You set up the other computers to do their authentication through NIS. This means that identity and permissions are shared across any computer using NIS.

NIS is viewed as having security issues, so you wouldn't want it running on (for example) a public web server. However for a small network within a university it is probably OK. Note that many, many universities have had or still have large NIS/NFS implementations dating back to the days of Sun workstations.

Answer 2

Look at Freenas it should do what you need it to. Just run freenas on the the computer that needs to share the data

Answer 3

Another similar solution would be using OpenFiler instead of Freenas. It might be a little bit much depending on exactly what you are trying to accomplish though. It would allow you to set up a datastore and control access to it however you would like. You could present it as an NFS or CIFS/Samba share. It would even allow you flexibility to later expand your storage, or even present disk to the remote systems over iSCSI.

edit

Based on your edits and comments, I would suggest simply creating a specific mount point for your shared storage, and sharing it out using Samba. The other machines can mount the share and you would not need a corresponding set of UID's and GID's.

Although, if you wanted to restrict access to specific files/directories in any way, those users would need to exist on both/all systems.

As for having the same environment for each user no matter where they logged in, you could replicate their user profiles across all of the PC's either manually or through some sort of mundane scheduled task.

I would suggest something like LDAP, but that might be a bit overcomplicated given what you want to accomplish.

Try mounting your 1TB hard drive on the machine it belongs to, and playing with Samba.