Colleagues,
I design a big corporative LAN. The most of the clients will work under
Windows 98/2000/XP. May be 3000 of users (include telecommuters).
I have to provide for a differentiation of the access rights to the resources of the LAN.
Something like MS Active Directory.
But first, I don't want to use Microsoft solutions and second, I think it must
be more reliable and free solutions.
Can you give me an advice? May be under SuSE linux? Thank You.

Hi,

I think it's a very bad idea not to use MS Active Directory (-> MS Domain Controller) solution in an only MS environment! You will have a lot of problems specially in part of administering the clients.

Nevertheless, Active Directory is nothing more than an implementation of LDAP v3 (or above). So, you could also create with Samba (and OpenLDAP) a Linux/Unix based PDC (Primary Domain Controller) providing Windows Clients :-)
Unfortunately, you just won't have the "easy to use" GUI's like the ones in MS Windows Server.

Best Regards,

simplyA

P.S: Please don't get me wrong about this. I'm the last one who would recommend using MS solutions but in this case, you really should be careful.

Dr. Sad, FYI, you have a small typo in your English translation. "Sibirian" -> "Siberian".
If I were to try to post in Russian, I would do a lot worse.

SuSE supplies three samba 3 books in the samba-doc package. Two of them Samba 3 by Example and Samba 3 Howto & Reference Guide have information on using Samba & LDAP. They recommend learning how to setup and use ldap instead of just plugging in their ldap boilerplate example. You might try using google with the terms "redbook IBM ldap". That may give you a better idea what you will be getting into. ( Even if you decide against using LDAP now, maybe you'll save the knowledge for the future when your company drops MS totally!)