Re: FW: slightly-OT: centralized user management

From: Roberto C. Sanchez (roberto_at_familiasanchez.net)
Date: 07/30/05

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    Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2005 10:15:30 -0400
To: debian-user@lists.debian.org

    On Fri, Jul 29, 2005 at 08:57:12PM -0700, David Christensen wrote:
    > Roberto C. Sanchez wrote:
    > > But there was nothing about getting a "roaming profile" type of setup.
    >
    > Roaming Profiles and Offline Folders are different Windows features. You need
    > domain networking and Windows Server (2003, maybe 2k) to enable the former, but
    > only Workgroup networking and a workstation Windows (XP Pro, XP Home?, Win2k?)
    > to do the later (also works with Domain networking).
    >
    Right. I am looking for something more cross platform. At least to
    cover Windows and Linux and maybe Mac OS X. I am not familiar with
    Windows networking, so I don't know what all the correct terminology is.
    I just recall that at one place I worked everyone had laptops in docking
    stations. If you logged into the Windows domain at least once a
    particular machine, it would cache your login credentials and your
    Windows equivalent of $HOME.

    >
    > I've heard of Unix implementations of the equivalent of Roaming Profiles (Sun?
    > HP?), and may have used such on an HP graphics terminal, but I never roamed.
    > There's probably an open-source equivalent out there.
    >
    I spent several hours searching Google last night and came up empty.
    The closest thing I found was a SourceForge project called huddleserver
    that was registered in mid 2002 and is still in Planning stage (or
    basically abandoned). I think that simply mounting $HOME from an NFS
    provides a fairly close approximation. The problem comes with offline
    support.

    >
    > The closed *nix thing to Offline Folders that I've heard of is rsync. CVS can
    > provide similar functionality, and is more robust/ careful in the face of
    > collisions. I've used Offline Folders and administered laptops with it, and I
    > don't like it.
    >
    Last night I was thinking that it's not to difficult to create a mount
    point (or even just use /home) where, when a user logs in under Linux,
    rsync is used to copy the $HOME contents from the server. After that,
    logging out would trigger an rsync back to the server. If the machine
    was offline, then the rsync would delay until the machine was back on
    the network. However, there are a couple of issues with this approach:

    - How would login credentials be stored/cached? I know that Windows
      NT/2k/XP do this, but I know Linux does not. It would require hacking
      together some sort of PAM module that con do this and be able to
      enforce the associated account policies as well.
    - User 1 logs in at machine A, which is offline, and makes changes in
      $HOME. He then logs in to machine B, which is online, and makes
      changes in $HOME. The changes from B will immediately be sync'd to
      the server, but the changes from A will not. When A is next on the
      network, the changed files in A will overwrite the more recent changes
      from B. A CVS-type approach may help here. This may also happens if
      the user logs into machine A (online) and then into machine B (online)
      and then makes different changes in both. The changes of whichever
      machine is logged out last will be the ones preserved while the others
      are lost.

    I think that is possible to solve the first problem with a PAM-based
    approach, as I mentioned. I think that the second approach could be
    solved by two things:

    - Disallow more than one login session on machines that are
      authenticating against the central authority (Samba/LDAP).
    - (Not foolproof) Check timestamps on modified files. If there are
      files on the server that have more recent timestamps than those on the
      local machine (i.e., changes from a previous login session were
      committed from a different machine), force the user to choose what to
      do. This would require some interactive console and/or X-based dialog
      to prompt the user about which files have been changed and what to do
      about them.

    >
    > My $0.02,
    >
    > David
    >

    I think I am approaching about $0.05 worth :-)

    -Roberto 

    -- 
Roberto C. Sanchez
http://familiasanchez.net/~sanchezr



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