g4sra <g4sra@???> wrote:

>> How is the Linux server going to authenticate users, via /etc/passwd or
>> other ?
>>
>> A lot depends on this, also the number of users will have a factor as
>> well.

> Which network authentication method would you suggest ?

I think what Roland was getting at here is the number of users and how they are dealt with makes a huge difference.

At one extreme, you have 28 seats, each one of them has a user such as "user1", and you can simply use /etc/passwd & /etc/shadow to manage that single user one each seat. You could probably build one software image and simply image all 28 machines with that one image.

At the other extreme, every person has their own login and can use any seat at any time (and there are hundreds or even thousands of them) so that progress/results can be logged for each person. In this case, you will really need a centralised user management such as Roland described using Samba & AD.
You could still image each machine from one common image - but you'll need to do some post-imaging setup to give each machine a unique set of identifiers etc for the AD to work properly.