<p>In the Microsoft world, it's call "Active Directory" (or "AD" for short), but all in all, it's really just a bast*rdized version of LDAP, which is the way to go. You could setup LDAP on your server (along with the accounts) and then use LAT (sudo apt-get install lat) (LDAP Administration Tool) to assist you in managing the system, but one thing to consider is the UIDs.</p>
<p>Right now you have the same account (for example), let's call it "Joe") on all 3 systems. I would bet that on all 3 systems, you have different UIDs, which could cause some issues with file sharing and permissions if you wanted to say setup a Workgroup network and attempt to share files and folders. So if you are on Machine 1 logged as Joe with UID 1001 and you are logged onto Machine 2 as Joe with UIDS 1023, well, you can see right there that is going to cause some issues. It gets even messier, but I won't get into all of that here.</p>
<p>My advice is to:</p>
<p>1) Setup LDAP on your server and also make it a file server.</p>
<p>2) Setup the accounts to use LDAP / be issued from the server (Like a Windows Domain Controller using AD does)</p>
<p>3) Properly migrate all files, folders and permissions from all 3 systems /home into the /home on the server.</p>
<p>(This is kind of like setting up a log file server to hold all log files in /var and then pointing all of your other servers to use that /var directory vs. the local one. Same concept, but with /home instead.)</p>
<p>4) Point all 3 client systems to the /home directory on the server vs on the local systems.</p>
<p>UPDATE 08/31/10 - <a href="http://www.ghacks.net/2010/08/31/set-up-your-ldap-server-on-ubuntu-10-04/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ghacks.net/2010/08/31/set-up-your-ldap-server-on-ubuntu-10-04/</a></p>
