Loggin in to a Windows Domain
 

At work we have a Windows 2000 network with two domains. I have added a Red Hat 8 Linux computer to one of the domains. Is it possible to log in to a user account on the Windows domain at the login prompt?

/Per Lindström

If you have Samba (and Smbfs) installed, this shouldn't be a problem - you can then just mount the Win2000 shares as normal, with the appropriate username and password.

I tried to explain that I can already do that. What I want to do is to log directly in to the Windows domain from Linux login prompt rather than first logging in locally and then mounting the share(s).

You can have the shares mounted with entries in the /etc/fstab.

Here is a webpage quick howto with a section on using a credentials file for the username and password. Also look at the smbfs section of 'man mount' or 'man fstab'.
http://www.linuxhomenetworking.com/l...m#_Toc88316249

Sorry, you cannot log into a Windows 2000 or 2003 domain from a Linux workstation and have that machine become part of Active Directory. You can only mount the shares with credentials, not actually join AD. Microsoft actively hates Linux, so they won't allow it. I'd love to be able to join my AD domain with my Linux boxes but it just isn't happening. I do as you do and just mount the shares as needed.

Good luck though, it's an excellent quest.

Logging into and joining windows domain
 

Yes you can set up your linux box to join and authenticate on a windoze 2003 AD domain. Redmond magazine has a decent article that will point you in the right direction to acomplish this. http://www.redmondmagazine.com/colum...itorialsID=858 . There are some minor problems with this article but it will get you going. The main problem that I found was when I entered the ad domain controller fqdn it did not work, I used the ip address and it worked great. The other problem was when I sighned on to the domain using a user name that I had allready created on the linux box caused problems. I needed to romove all reference to the user including the folders in the /tmp directory.