[klug] Shared /home over LAN

[klug.member.lancer at xoxy.net]

Can anyone point me to where I can learn how to make a shared /home 
directory over a LAN setup like in our school? The guy who set that up 
did a nice job and all but there are some fairly major bugs and he's 
hard to get hold of. To be honest, I'm starting to get frustrated by the 
errors and the inability to get hold of him, but I don't want to go into 
too much detail on a public forum like this and think it's best if I 
start all over but learn to do things for myself.

Basically, I want to know how to make one machine the file server, where 
the /home dirs are linked to the drive on that machine, so all saved 
work from students goes to one place instead of being duplicated on each 
machine, individual permissions intact. Obviously adding new student 
accounts etc will have to have identical user IDs. I'm not sure if I 
also want to share other DIRs like /bin etc. Common permissions would be 
nice (e.g: I can ban any student from playing a given game setting 
permissions on only one computer).

I am not wanting to make a dumb terminal situation where the central 
computer has to be really powerful, or one computer has to do all the 
hard drive / memory tasks of the many machines - that would slow 
everyone down. /home access is all I'm really wanting at least for now.

I am also interested in the antiporn set up as mentioned before (like 
having one machine as the internet gateway for the others) but for now 
setting up the LAN /home dir is my priority. I understand the network 
guru used LDAP for the current setup, but my experience in this is zilch.

Can anyone point me to where I can learn this stuff fast enough to have 
set it up myself within the next week or so? (e.g: not a large thesis of 
many possibilities - I am a slow reader). Last time I asked a forum this 
I explained what I wanted in great detail, and all I got was "your 
network - up to youy how you go about it", which was not helpful.

Thanks in advance.
Lance.