we have about 15-20 laptops that dual boot into xp and ubuntu 7.04. on the XP side they are joined to a domain and part of active directory. ubuntu uses ldap to authenticate. we have figured out a way to get wireless authentication prior to logon on xp but need a way to do this on the linux side as well. the xp side authenticates the computer for wireless rather than a user prior to logon so they are able to log on to the active directory domain through a wireless connection. The problem is all our wireless authentication has to occur with an active directory account and the linux side isn't connected to that. is there a way to get linux to use active directory to authenticate wireless prior to logon then use ldap as the actual logon? or even if we could join the linux side to the active directory domain instead of ldap, is there a way to get it to authenticate prior to logon?

Could you provide more details on the wireless authentication process. What protocol is used? Active directory may be used to look up certificates for a radius server. You may be able to use xsupplicant on the clients to authenticate.

google for "8021X-HOWTO". The FAQ states the free-radius can use Active Directory. It is the Free Radius <-> client interaction that I think you want to work with.

One of these resources might help:
Be forewarned that Microsoft's "Embrace, Expand, Destroy" policy may be cause for numerous non-standard issues. Such as what they did to non-standardize kerberos, ldap, eap and you are dealing with virtually all of them at once.

I work for a "subdivision" of the main IT department which means I don't directly have control over how our wireless network operates. Actually, I think the department we support might be the only one on campus that has linux users so I doubt anything is going to get changed for the 30 or so computers we are trying to get to authenticate. As far as I know, we use WPA security. I'm not exactly sure how it all works yet since I'm new here but the signal is broadcast such that all a user has to do when they want to connect is type in their AD credentials and domain name and it authenticates (this is on the windows side). I have been informed recently that these laptops can't connect to our wireless network at all on the linux side, so getting that problem solved first would be more beneficial than figuring out how to get the wireless connection enabled prior to logon. I don't recall hearing anything about a radius server being used here and I imagine it would be difficult to get the higher-ups to go along with that. I hope this helps a little bit but if you need more info let me know and i'll try to squeeze it out of someone.

scratch that. i found a nice guide with several configs and we were able to get it to work. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...light=wpa+peap