lownoize

No we don't have any Macs in our lab. If you only need filesharing like nfs/samba for the mac users it should be doable netatalk Netatalk - Networking Apple Macintosh through Open Source. Or you could use nfs and ldap. Here is a short howto: http://mattfleming.com/node/190

For Clients we use images, and roll them out via pxe. We use drbl/clonezilla for that task. Clonezilla - Sever Edition If you are not comfortable with images because you need different sets of software on every system or have different hardware have a look at FAI FAI - Fully Automatic Installation

does it work for other users? Does sftp work? Looks like there is a forced command configured for the user/group, and that is 'internal-sftp., so only sftp should and no interactive login. Could you please check /etc/ssh/sshd_config forced commands? Just grep ForceCommand /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Has the user a valid shell? Is the shell listed in /etc/shells? Could you run ssh -vvv username@host from another linux system to your webserver and attach the log, because your debug log from sshd shows only the closing of the connection

We use Ubuntu 10.04 LTS for all Servers: Server 1: OpenLDAP for user authentication, cups/pykoat for printing, dhcp.... Server 2: nfs fileserver for user homedirectories, and ldap slave. I would recomend Ubuntu LTS for Servers, because you get 5 years updates.

check out FAI (Fully Automatic Installation) FAI - Fully Automatic Installation works with debian/ubuntu/...

We use Linux 60 Clients 4 Servers all systems run Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

We have a lab with 60 linux clients, and have nearly no software costs anymore. We run Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on all clients, but think about switching to linux Mint because of Unity. For Imaging of the clients we use drbl/clonezilla, which boots the clients via pxe and uses multicast. We only have one image for all clients, network configuartion is done via dhcp. Printing is done via cups/pykota. We use dsh (distributed ssh) to install packages and for updates. The management of all clients is not that time consuming like it was with windows clients. The biggest problem for our users is open/libreoffice. So many docx documents arround and the import function does not work properly with some documents. if you have any additional questions, just drop me a message.

We use dsh (distributed ssh) for remote shutdown of all clients in our lab. You just need an ssh public key on every Host. You can create groups and run every command on many hosts. like: "dsh -c -g clients apt-get upgrade -y" to upgrade all hosts in the clients group. for ups remote shutdown you could use apcupsd, it works like powerchute from apc, but it is included in ubuntu.