>From my perspective, this topic has had some very interesting
contributions. Thank you all whom have contributed.

To pick out just one as an example, I had considered NIS\YP to be (or
rather didn't consider because) all but defunct, and not taken it's
simplicity and reliability over other methods into consideration.

> Would have saved a bit of speculation and discussion had these details been provided earlier :-/
Intentional, only the available hardware and purpose is set in stone.
Too many details too early stifles creativity, the 'speculation'
promoted 'discussion' and raised some points that would probably not
have been made otherwise. ;)


So far I am getting

Active Directory, supported by PAM or SSSD on the Client workstation to
control console login.

Either /home mounted from the sever over NFS, or individual User [home]
shares over SMB. Sever directory of Training Software mounted\shared
similarly.

Which yields

Single point of User account management on the server.
Server resources restricted to 30 max simultaneous Users.
Regular backup of the sever provides protection against all User data loss.
Single point (well subdirectories, easy to script) for review of Trainee
progress by management.

Hmm, can AD prevent simultaneous single User login on multiple clients ?
Somehow I have never needed AD, so lack experience with it.

Interestingly little mention of workstation BOOTP, NFS Root, Cloning On
Boot. Manually applying CCR's in each training room of 28+ workstations
is going to be a pita. No one mentioned the likes of Puppet, Ansible,
ClusterSSH etc.