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I would like to set up a Terminal server and connect 4 or 5 "terminals" running Ubuntu desktop for a small school. In functional terms, I'd like the students to be able to log on to their accounts from any machine, using a username and password.

I'm a real newbie at networking, but I've been using Ubuntu for several years and I have a programming background.

Where should I begin?

Thanks in advance!

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    Do you only need centralized accounting, or do the students also need to get a personal home directory mapped? For the former, PAM and some authentication server (Radius/LDAP/etc) is required. The latter requires either NFS or some smb setup.
    – noleti
    Aug 13, 2014 at 2:59
  • Thanks. The students need to be able to login and see their file space from any machine. I guess NFS is the way to go? What is NFS :-)
    – dahornor
    Aug 14, 2014 at 3:25

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There are many ways to do this. I would recommend a solution based on LDAP for authentication and user management, and NFS for storage.

In the following, I assume that by "Terminals" you do not mean X server forwarding, but actual local sessions. For actual terminal servers the server runs the applications, and the client simply displays the "GUI". More info on that setup here.

That also reminds me: Edubuntu might be worth a look for you.

User management

You need a centralized database to store usernames and passwords. LDAP is one solution for that. It is a database running on your server, and the clients use the linux PAM architecture to connect to it for authentication.

How to set up LDAP

Storage

NFS is a network file system. Simplified, this means that you can mount it over the network, just like a local partition. In a nutshell, it is similar to smb, the windows "shared drives" protocol. In your case, you would mount the user's home directory from the central NFS server after login.

How to set up NFS

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