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I recently deployed about a dozen Ubuntu (Karmic) desktops in a small office. Everything was going great, but storage became an issue. I then moved /home to an NFS mount which solved the immediate problem.

Months later, I'm regretting this. The company is extremely disorganized with high turnover, people never stay at the same desk for long and now I have 12 machines that anyone needs to access at any given time. This gets crazy with conflicting UID/GID's as well.

I'd like to just use LDAP and make the problem go away. The issue is, they want to be self sufficient, so I need some (easy) way for the office administrator to manage users. Preferably something GUI driven and simple/intuitive to use.

What are my options?

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LDAP and nfs are two different issues. What about using LDAP for authentication and autofs to automatically mount the home directory via nfs? –  txwikinger Jul 28 '10 at 19:56
I feel your pain. While there are certainly technical solutions available, I am not sure which approach is most applicable to your situation and your conditions. Nevertheless I would probably ask the question at instead, considering the very general sysadmin character of the question. –  andol Jul 28 '10 at 20:08

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up vote 5 down vote accepted

You can try eBox for the server, it has a very straightforward web interface, you can install it from the repositories, and has all the functionality you need. The whole process is documented in the Ubuntu Server Guide, check

However you still would have to take care of the configuration in the client workstations.

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