Need a solution for a small network

[lefsha]

Hi,

I have already spent days being looking for a proper solution for my network.
There are some tools around, which give a solution for a part of a problem,
but nothing I could found which solves it completely.

Then I thought, that I miss some proper words to feed Google with them.
But from other side I want something, that not really to be a challenge for Linux world.
That is why I'd like put it down here and see the replies in a hope to clarify things to me.

I have a small number of computers which I'd like to connect to each other.
One of them is a tower which has to play the role of server, others are mainly laptops
which could be connected to the server through the ethernet or wifi interface.

I want to have all users accounts to be on the server. And a user from what ever computer
has to be able to access _all resources_ on the main one.
If user has no connection to the server then it should be able to login locally, but as soon
the laptop sees the server there should be kind of sync taken place to update both profiles
and data. As I mentioned there should be only one profile and list of data dirs which is syncing around the
network. If a user wants to login the first time on a certain box the current server profile and data folder structure should be downloaded from the server. It would be great if even these data structure could be created
from the template automatically.

I plan to use KDE around the network. No Gnome DE no Windows in any reincarnation planed to be connected
to the network. So I don't care whether it would be possible for Windows user to connect.

The main requirement is to have only one profile with all configurations and access to the data folder which has its local copy to save network bandwidth or to be able to use documents if network is not accessible.
If not all documents could be saved locally, then only those of them which are in frequent use.

That is what I need. An here below how I think it should work.

1. The authentication not necessary has to be done over the server. I see no point to wait till the network and then server would be accessible. It should work fast like on single computer. Any way sometimes the network will be not accessible.

That means for me I have somehow to sync all these files in /etc like passwd and so on.
If the user has changed his password then thi local copy should have higher priority and overwrite
its password and groups settings on the server.

2. The profile should be syncing in the same way. The more recent file has higher priority over the old one.

3. For data user the situation would be more complicated, cause its more sensitive which data could be overwrite
and which not. I think about two fields for time modification property. OK. One can use file created time property for that. For example if one user starts to modify his local copy of the file, then if it was a clean copy from server created time property has to be updated to the current time. Later on one can check files for overlap and if there
is no one, the newer one could be copied above the old one, otherwise user hast to make a decision by himself.

4. On each laptop a sync program has to be started. On the server kind of VCS system like git or mercurial in additional has to be run in order to track changes.

5. Of course such things like a printer, fax, sound system should be accessible from any computer.

6. To automatize all these things probably a number of scripts has to be written.

I would appreciate any comments if they come.


P.S. Does it exist in the way I have described?

P.P.S. If something is not clear please ask.
_________________
Lefsha

[malern]

The user account part can be done with LDAP. Use LDAP replication on the client machines, so that you can still auth even if the main server is unavailable.

As for the file syncing, you could use something like Unison. Or if you wanted to get really fancy you could use a network file system that has an offline mode, there's a list here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_file_systems#Distributed_fault-tolerant_file_systems

Or you could just use plain old rsync with some custom scripts.

[lefsha]