Linux and desktops on isolated LAN

[me-5yx05kfkO/aqeI1yJSURBw at public.gmane.org (Matthew Gillen)]

Kristian Hermansen wrote:
> It still does.  But lots of other applications, like Firefox, do this
> as well.  Remember when Firefox <1.0 (Phoenix?) would break if it
> closed down improperly  :-) 

Yuck, I forgot about that...

> On 7/27/07, Matthew Gillen <me-5yx05kfkO/aqeI1yJSURBw at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>> The multiple versions thing might be an issue though.  Although RHEL and
>> CentOS (if they are the same release) will have the same versions of GNOME/KDE.
> 
> And what happens when you have a RHEL3 LDAP server and Ubuntu Feisty
> LDAP/NFS/GDM clients :-)  It breaks I can tell you!  I implemented a
> Frankenstein configuration similar to this in 2005 while I was working
> as an intern for IBM at UMass Amherst.  I would be interested to hear
> an elegant hack if anyone implements it...

I'm sure it does break.  But the OP specified that he was using RHEL-5 and
CentOS-5, in which case he'd be fine, since by definition CentOS uses the
same version of everything as RHEL.

The only way I could think to deal with the problem you describe is to pick
a version and compile it from source for some (or all) different types of
machines, and don't use the pre-packaged ones at all.  Not very elegant...

You might be able to play tricks with certain environment vars to force all
the GNOME/KDE configs to use specific directories, ie ".kde-3.4.1" instead
of ".kde", and then set that up on a per-machine basis in /etc/profile or
something.  I know you can set that up pre/post-fixes to config dir names
when compiling from source, it seems like there /should/ be a way to
configure it after compilation too...

Still, even that would kind of suck since a user would set his wallpaper (or
any other config) to something, and then he'd login to another box and it
wouldn't be set, and they'd be confused as to why certain machines shared
configs and others didn't.

> Btw, Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10) will include a one-step LDAP server
> configuration in the Ubuntu Server version.  It will be very similar
> to the 'LAMP' install option which meta-configures
> Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP automagically...

Sounds interesting.  I remember setting up Samba to authenticate against
LDAP was a real nightmare.  That might have gotten better over the years though.

Matt

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