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

[dan radom]

* Brian Jarrett (bjarrett at garcoschools.org) wrote:
> 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

LDAP is the way to go.  My suggestion would be to read the OpenLDAP
everywhere atrible that was in linux journal.  It's available on line as
well.

I've weitten several Net::LDAP perl scripts to manage my directory.
They're available at http://radom.org/lostfound.php.

dan