Centralized DB of "system" users

[Manolis Kiagias]

Valentin Bud wrote:
> Hello list,
>
>  I don't know if the Subject says what i really want to achieve but i do
> hope that i will make myself understood.
>
>  I work for a school and i want to install in 2 labs on very low performance
> computers (1 Ghz CPU, 126 Mb RAM) some linux distro (zen walk). I *need*
> to install linux because there are some programs that need to run on those
> stations and guess what, they only work on linux.
>
>  There are different students that use those computers and they change
> frequently. So i thought
> to make a server, using FreeBSD (of course), that has a database of users so
> the linux machines
> don't have local users but they query the DB to get login credentials and
> such. I don't
> really know what to look for. So any suggestion and hints to how can i
> achieve this
> are welcomed.
>
> thank you and a great day,
> v
>   

What you are looking for is called NIS:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/network-nis.html

However note it is not (unfortunately) interoperable between FreeBSD and 
Linux, although there is a setting (UNSECURE=true in /var/yp/Makefile of 
the NIS server) that works around this, albeit it lowers security.

There are other solutions too (LDAP?) but NIS would be the easiest to setup.