I'm building myself a small Linux network in a virtual lab using Ubuntu 12.04 LTS as the OS. For my sins I'm a Windows sysadmin but want to branch out my skill-set.
So far I've built separate VMs for BIND/ISC-DHCP/OpenLDAP/NFS/pfSense/Test client and got everything working together perfectly.
I'm effectively trying to find Linux replacements for all the things I do on Windows networks. I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions for the following:-
1) A centralized configuration tool for managing many client computers (similar to Group Policy). I hear good things about puppet?
2) A way of network deploying an OS to a workstation (or VM in my lab case) and preferably automating the initial installation. Is it acceptable to just create a reference machine and clone it? Or would this be bad practice like in Windows if you don't sysprep your reference machine first?
3) Network Shared Drives. I understand how to mount NFS shares as I've done this for my home drives and set the user accounts in OpenLDAP to look to the NFS mount point, but how do end users in Linux OS's usually connect to network drives such as common areas for shared work and such? Sorry to throw all the Windows terminology around but usually I deploy drive mappings in group policy so users just have them on login. Is this done using Samba as shares are less permanent than NFS? I think this interests me the most!
Many thanks for any advice!
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