A unified login for local students
The Waits River Valley School in East Corinth, Vermont
rbTechnologies was contracted to design, build and deploy a solution for a local school with too many login environments.
WRVS had a mixed environment with a Windows 2003 Active directory server for the roughly 100 workstations running Windows XP Pro, and an Edubuntu K12 LTSP LInux Terminal server with 60 thin client workstations.
rbTechnologies was contracted to provide a unified desktop environment and document storage for users. Regardless of which environment or workstation they logged in to, they needed access to their documents and folders from both Windows and Linux.
rbTechnologies installed a CentOS5.2 server with hardware RAID and centralized backup software, running Samba (Windows file and print sharing for Linux and Unix). We integrated the K12LTSP server into the domain using Winbind for login authentication, and created user directories on the new Samba server that were accessible from both Windows and the LTSP logins.
In addition, rbTechnologies set up roaming profiles and Desktop and My Documents redirection for the Windows workstations, so that users storing large amounts of data on their desktops didn't experience the dreaded "Your roaming profile could not be found, using locally cached copy instead" error on login. This provided the added benefit of storing all user data on the fileserver, where it is backed up every evening.
As of this writing, we are in the process of deploying LDAP as the authentication mechanism for both the LTSP and Windows Domain logon environments, thus creating that holy grail of network computing, the Single Sign On!
We specialize in these sorts of complicated mixed environment problem solving: Let us help you with your next challenge and watch your productivity and user satisfaction increase.