NIS on a school network - need some clarifications

[Hugo Silva]

Hi,

I'm working on a project to change the network on my school to open source
software only (FreeBSD/Linux workstations only).

I knew about NIS from readings of the handbook years ago, so I revisited
it today, but there' is something that's missing. I understand the NIS
accounts reside on the master server and I have to add users on the master
server. But then, users on workstations will have their home directories
etc referring only to the local machine.

I want to have users get their home directories from a central location
too. Is there any 'official' process to make this work, with NIS if
possible ?

I plan to have a 'student-shared-area' that will be NFS mounted on every
workstation on boot, but I want each user to have their files available,
wherever they login from.

Also, I assume there is no problem in using NIS accounts with X. From the
logic of it, there shouldn't be any problems.

A few last questions,

Since I plan to switch the whole network from windows to FreeBSD / Linux
(only adding linux because other people want it :-P), I'll need to
substitute the following applications:

- Visual C++ (anjuta)
- MS Access  (?)

I don't know much about access, but I believe it's possible to have a
ms-access database server.. if that's the case, is there a open source
client with a similiar GUI to ms access available ? (note: mysql/etc won't
do, the school program says ms access, so we need something similiar)


Any insight on these issues is most welcome

Regards,

Hugo