[lug] maintaining active directory functionality by migrating to Linux...

[Brian Jarrett]

All,

I've been working on removing windows servers in our school district.
The two remaining win2k servers that we are running also run Exchange
and our internet proxy/filter.  Currently our organization uses Active
Directory to maintain all user accounts, passwords and some other misc.
information.

My linux servers are using winbind to authenticate users.  No user
accounts are maintained on the linux servers at this time.

I hope to have at least one linux server at each school building and
want a centralized user account system to manage everything on our WAN.
We will probably still have windows and macintosh workstations for some
time, so I'll be making heavy use of Samba and netatalk, as I am now.

I've seen OpenLDAP, but have done nothing with it... is this the way to
go?  Are there other ways to manage user accounts across many servers?
Are there any good ideas on doing a transition like this?  And lastly,
if I had to keep a Windows server around a while longer, would OpenLDAP
or something else be compatible if I wanted to go ahead and make the
switch?


Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

Brian Jarrett
Network Administrator
Garfield County School District 16