This article looks beyond Active Directory at a variety of approaches available today to getting Linux and Windows to work together on the network. While still not a job for an average Linux administrator or a Windows Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) who’s still wet behind the ears, there are tools available that make the job easier than ever.
We’ve been using it on both OS X and Linux machines for quite awhile now, and unlike some solutions will cache the user’s profile on the local machine. That’s an important factor for laptop users.
Samba 4 is still in development, and isn’t close to being ready? Wow, it’s been quite a few years, at least 5 since they started.
That’s kind of a miss-leading. Samba 4 AD features have been merging with the Samba 3 File/Print Server and Samba 3 Wins server in the main development branch since the beginning of the year.
They are supposedly on schedule to start releasing stuff that is ready for people to play with in a production environment sometime this coming winter / next spring.
Since they’ve been working on it since 2004, I won’t exactly hold my breath.
Strange they don’t mention the Fedora / Red Hat / 389 directory server:
http://directory.fedoraproject.org/
It has the same ancestor as OpenLDAP, but was further improved by Netscape, and now by Red Hat, and seems to be somewhat more mature and has more features than OpenLDAP.
Addition: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedora_Directory_Server
Edited 2010-08-05 21:09 UTC