Blessings to All,

As Win 2003 Server has Active Directory to authenticate users ... is there a similar facility where linux desktops can authenticate?

In addition, is there a way to authenticate an Ubuntu client on a Windows 2003 domain?

Thank you for taking the time to assist me,

Pierre

There's nothing really similar to AD in that it's both a directory, authentication system, and service locator... I suppose NIS+ would be the closest thing, but it's not widely deployed any more. For directory there's OpenLDAP and for realm authentication there's Kerberos (what Microsoft copied and twisted into their domain authentication).

What about eDirectory by Novell?

Dirk

pbowrin,

Check out Samba 3 and Samba 4 at Samba.org

You should also check out the free on-line books regarding samba deployments also at Samba.org.

While Samba is not a windows AD clone, it does function as a NT or Win2k domain member. So you should be able to authenticate properly in a Win2003 domain because windows should be backwards compatible with win2k domain members.

Finally Ubuntu should work well with a samba domain controller and LDAP.

Maybe Fedora Directory Server?

In 1996 the original developers of slapd became Netscape employees and developed Netscape Directory Server, which is now Fedora Directory Server

*LDAPv3 implementation
*4-Way Multi-Master Replication, to provide fault tolerance and high write performance
*Active Directory user and group synchronization
*Secure authentication and transport (SSLv3, TLSv1, and SASL)
*On-line, zero downtime, LDAP-based update of schema, configuration, management and in-tree Access Control Information (ACIs)
*Graphical console for all facets of user, group, and server management

We're considering implementing it for our servers here.

You can have any Linux system against AD by configuring the Winbind facility of Samba (you don't need to run the main smbd service for this, just the Winbind service).

Neither Fedora Directory Server nor the current version of eDirectory are Kerberos servers, so to provide AD-like authentication on Linux you need to run a Kerberos service in tandem with OpenLDAP/FDS/eDirectory.