i am considering taking down my Small Business Server 2003 Active Directory and implementing directory based authentication using openLDAP. i am not really interested in other features of AD so i think i can 'afford' using openLDAP. my question is what exactly can i authenticate agains openLDAP? openRADIUS? Samba? Windows XP? Windows 2000/2003 server? also i interested if someone has made this switch and can share their experiences. what were the benefits/drawbacks? right now i am runnning an all-windows shop but i am considering moving several parts of it to open source because of the applications i need. any input appreciated...

We did not switch from AD to LDAP, but started with LDAP from the beginning. We use samba + LDAP + freeradius for all of our authentication needs. LDAP is the backend, and samba and freeradius can hook right into it. Samba is setup as a domain controller so all of our windows clients can authenticate against it. Using pam, linux clients can also authenticate via LDAP. Apache authentication (.htaccess) is done using mod_auth_ldap. WPA enabled wireless clients (win & linux) authenticate using PEAP via freeradius. We used to have a Linux based l2tp/ipsec vpn that used freeradius, however I recently swapped that out with openVPN (which also uses freeradius). Our mail is handled by a 3rd party, however I have been looking into a postfix/courier-pop solution that can use ldap as a backend. We also run various webapps (bugzilla, dotproject, etc...) that use ldap as a backend.

thanks for the reply. isn't there a way to authenticate windows machines (windows xp and windows 2003 servers) against openLDAP without samba? also, how did you like dotProject? we use SharePoint right now but i would love to change that.

Using pgina you can authenticate windows systems directly via ldap or radius. As for dotproject, I can only comment on the setup and administraton aspect. I did the install about 3 weeks ago and haven't had any issues so far. The install was a piece of cake and I haven't had any user complaints/issues yet.

thanks again...