Hi,

I was just wondering what the equivalent of AD is in linux? There's a small office network with just windows clients and the moment in a workgroup, but they want some more things like their own email server and file server etc.

With this in mind, is there something that could hold their account info centrally?


Any help (as always) is much appreciated.

well "AD" is really a jumble of seperate things, generally thinsg stolen from UNIX at that. for a domain controller, Samba makes a great PDC, whilst OpenLDAP provides a technically accurate and standards based LDAP service, not something M$ would know a thing about of coruse...

thanks, I'll check out OpenLDAP. I don't really need half the stuff that AD does. Or the huge licensing cost!

Dude don't waste your time call dell and order a new server with microsoft small business server on it. Or if they have decent hardware already buy a copy of small business server. SBS is going to give you everything you need. Hell if they can't afford sbs I would not want to work for them. Also if you really new about ad and microsoft products you would not ask this question you would have already told them to by sbs.

Watts3000 - not sure if you were aware of where you are. This is LINUXquestions and we provide Linux help here. If we were promoting Microsoft products then, yeah, your suggestion would be fine. But we're not and it isn't.

I direct you to Post#3 - where the OP says "I don't really need half the stuff that AD does. Or the huge licensing cost!". SBS is not the solution.

watts3000 - I'm an MCSE, I know all I want to know about AD and MS. What I don't know about is Linux, which is why I'm here, and they're a charity so they don't have money to burn.

Thanks for the input anyway.

There are also how-to's available to setup a Linux machine as a domain controller using: Linux, LDAP, Kerberos, and Samba in case you were interested in doing something along those lines.. Or if you were looking to do single sign-on and be able to access Linux and windows resources..

that'd definitely be interesting - do you have any recommended links? (little bit lazy I know, but if you have a really good link then it's worth the ask!)

www.samba.org

This is an excellent place to start. The documentation is excellent. They talk about integration into Lan Manager and AD, but you could use Samba as your single sign on system without any AD and without a genuine Microsoft PDC.

Samba is actually based on SMB and CIFS which were created by IBM and hijacked by Microsoft. IMO SMB is better than Unix NFS. Samba uses Kerberos as its authentication engine, just like AD, and Samba uses OpenLDAP for its directory services, similar to AD.

Samba is a good way to implement single sign on, file shares, printer shares, and network directory services even if you only have Linux and/or Unix machines.

thanks, I really appreciate that. I've just been reading the site and it seems the documentation is very helpful indeed - streets ahead of most linux/open-source stuff, which is my major gripe with it.

I didn't realise Samba was so powerful. Thanks for all the input, it's a big help.

Since you are running Centos, take a lok at the Redhat Directory server docs..

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/dir-server/

The fact that Samba leverages Kerberos with AD really helps in regards to getting AD to authenticate with your CentOS Linux boxes (i'm assuming you're running CentOS by the previous post). Check out this article by Jerry Carter regarding the subject which is enlightening http://www.informit.com/articles/art...p?p=19490&rl=1.

I have a how-to on my website http://www.opensourcehowto.org for setting up samba as a primary domain controller (PDC)

OpenLDAP LAM Samba as PDC
http://www.opensourcehowto.org/how-t...ba-as-pdc.html

and if you feeling a little bit more adventurous later on you could try getting into the policies with samba

Samba Primary Domain Controller with Group Policies
http://www.opensourcehowto.org/how-t...-policies.html

Thanks Paul_Mat, I'll definitely give it a look (and a bit of clicking time too!)

I wouldn't pay too mauch attention to that, he's just spamming us.