We are on a University campus network, and I am working for a professor who wants to network at least three new computers with four existing machines. I'd like to know the best way to setup these computers to work together. Below are the requirements:
- One computer will host the data (it has 1TB of HDD space)
- 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 the CPU/RAM)
The issue 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 specific 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.