[Nottingham] News from the Church Office

[Michael Leuty]

I hope this will be appropriate on the eve of the Awareness Days.

My cunning plans to infiltrate open source software into our Church Office 
proceed, albeit at a snail's pace.

We now have a server running CentOS, but at present this is doing no more 
than acting as an Internet gateway.
We have a mixed network: the three main machines run Ubuntu, WinXP and 
Win98.
We have standardised on Firefox/Thunderbird on all machines and I am 
attempting to introduce OOo as the standard office suite (it is all that 
is available on the Ubuntu and WinXP machines).

The next step is to move all the data files from the clients to the 
server, for ease of backing up. For the Windows machines the solution is 
fairly obvious: set up Samba on the server, and move the "My Documents" 
folder to the network drive (E:\ or whatever it is).

I should like to ask your advice about connecting the Ubuntu machine to 
the server.
First, should we set up a separate NFS server on the server or connect the 
Ubuntu machine to the Samba server used by the Windows clients?
Secondly, should we transfer the entire user's home directory to the 
server, or simply a "Documents" subdirectory within it? In other words, 
are Linux clients happy with having the user's home directory on a 
server?

Mike

-- 
Michael Leuty
Nottingham, UK