Hi, I'm tryng a solution to connect 700 microsoft workstation (made for the major part of windows 98/95 and some win 2000) in a network based on only linux server.
The network must have the authentication for the user and a domain structure (such Active Directory, but I can't use it because it is too much expansive)
What's the best way?
Now this my 3 solution:

1 - Can I use Samba to make the linux server as a PDC, how many PDC linux or replicas or backup can I make? Can I make a windows BDC of a linux PDC? How can I make the domain structure?

2 - How can I integrate linux in a Acrtive Directory service whithout give money for the "CALL License" to microsoft?

3 - Can I use LDAP or another opensource solution to resolve my problem?

Thanks Roberto.

We can understand that.

You can use Samba as a PDC. Here are some tutorials.

http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/esdd/tu...mba/index.html


http://networking.earthweb.com/netos...le.php/1144701

http://networking.earthweb.com/netos...le.php/1151091

You can use OpenLDAP to create a Samba BDC. It is a bit tricky, however, so most people don't. Linux is a whole lot more stable than Windows, however, so most people don't bother to create a BDC.

Samba 2.x behaves like a NT 4.0 server. Samba 3.x (now in beta) behaves like a Windows 2000 server. It can actually become a domain server on Windows 2000 domain and engage in multi-master replication.

Many organizations use hundreds of users on Samba 2.x. See samba.org for more info. The mailing lists have a lot of questions, comments and answers from people using Samba to run large networks.

I worked in an electronics factory and we had a server acting as the PDC and the e-mail server at the same time.
The factory is not so big (around 70 computers) but the server worked very well for about 4 years with no problems till we had to give maintenance to the transformer and we had to turn it off.

Linux and Samba are excellent choices and I'm sure that you will achieve your Linux solution. Read some tutorials and that's all, and if you have some trouble, you can always ask for help here.

4 sure, samba is the way to go for a PDC

I would do it at work, but they probably wouldnt let me due to the exchange server and other servers in other departments....good ol' M$, thats how they keep their monopoly

If it were my company, id be saving lots of money without and M$.

Sorry, thats my rant for today....ahh, that feels better