[Advice needed] Workgroup hilarities

[DeaJae]

After several months of testing, fighting with computers and continous tweaking. We got an Internet Cafe project up and running to give the young'uns something to do in the evenings.

Now after all the Laptop buying, invoicing and filtering setups, I want to have some way of getting the user to login to the laptops via a different method.
How it is:
7 laptops + 1 desktop (4x windows 2000 clients, 4 WinXP home (yes i know.. bloody suppliers..)) connected to DSL line via Wi Fi. WEP enabled and Keyed up. File and Print sharing running with Netbios blocked on a couple of laptops (under fixing). All connected together via WiFi DSL router.
all users logon locally to machines.
What i want to do:
Have the logons directed to a server or the desktop machine.
Settings and documents saved into user profiles on a server or the desktop.

Is this possible under the Workgroup setting? i've figured that mapped drives is possible but thye don't seem to be secure.
Also WinXP home has trouble seeing win2k clients, any workrounds?

Thanks guys

 

[Lyndsay #2337]

XP Home isn't capable of loging onto a domain. What can be done is to have accounts with the same names and passwords on each machine, and modify the profiles to point which ever machine they reside on. tweakui Can be used. Doing this is a pain if you have a lot of user accounts to manage, but is cheaper than with 2k/xp pro.

 

[Kaligraphic]

Install linux on them and have them login via LDAP/kerberos/samba(pick one).

Windows, though, would need to use a domain for that - use win2k Pro or XP Pro, put a win2k server on the network and slap the users into AD - or just use an NT4 domain if you've got NT4 around cheaper.

You need a real domain under windows, which means a windows server and client access licenses or a linux server with samba. It also means you need to replace that XP Home with pro or win2k.

*edit* this link might help if you go with linux*/edit*

 

[DeaJae]

We were toying with the idea of a linux domain server, but it seems the point where it can be located will max out our power in that area. Plus i don't have the time, knowledge or resources to learn to setup something like slackware easily.

NT4, thats a point! I have a legal copy and license since upgrading a couple of companies servers. nice one Kali

[edit] However, XP home still won't connect but can use the reources easily. XP home still may not share files/printers with windows 2000 machines.:/

Gonna convince my boss to try this Open License deal, £30 for each license isn't probaly too bad. As long as its a 'forever' license....

 

[Kaligraphic]

If you wanted to use linux, you wouldn't necessarily have to use any particular linux...

I tend to give people White Box Linux these days - if you wanted, you could try it on one of the XP Home machines, and see how you like it. You should be able to attach it to your NT4 domain.