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Re: [school-discuss] Active Directory support in linux distributions



As I understand it, what you want is for your users to login on a Linux workstation, but for login to be authenticated by an AD server, and their home directory to actually be a share mounted from a Windows server. The first can be handled by Winbind which comes with Ubuntu, SUSE, etc. The major distros all come with a GUI configuration utility where you can pick AD as the authentication mechanism. There are many articles on the web on how to set it up.

As to the second part, having the user's home directory actually be a mounted share from a Windows server, I don't think that's possible, but I don't think it's possible with a Windows desktop, either. Rather, while there is the local disk and a directory for the user on that disk, the remote share from the Windows server can be mapped to a directory within the local $HOME (Linux doesn't use drive letters), just as you would map a user's home directory on the Windows server to, say, drive H:. I would check out the Samba mailing lists for more info about this though (as I haven't worked with Samba for a few years). HTH

Peter

Matthew W. Ross wrote:
I'm not looking for full GPO implementations, nor managed printers or DFS support. I am simply looking for a Linux distribution that supports a user's home folder as it is specified in Active Directory. This home folder specification has existed at least since Windows NT, and even Samba supports providing one for users. Why can't a Linux distribution support mounting this at login? I was asking in hopes that I simply haven't looked at Distro X, and somebody on the list could nudge me in the right direction.

As for what I mean by a "Supported Distribution", I simply meant that the distro was still in development, not abandoned or defunct.

If such a distro doesn't exist yet, I'm rather sad for the Linux community. This is a pivotal feature which our school district depends on: The user's data must be backed up. We manage this only by having the files in a central storage which we can reliably backup ourselves. Without this ability, we cannot offer it to the users as a workstation, only as an internet kiosk.

Please don't take my comments as snide or rude. I am still hopeful that either this distribution exists, or that this feature becomes available in the near future.


--Matt Ross
Ephrata School District


----- Original Message -----
From: Tim Dressel
[mailto:tjdressel@xxxxxxxxx]
To: schoolforge-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent:
Tue, 25 May 2010 18:08:09 -0700
Subject: Re: [school-discuss] Active
Directory support in linux distributions


There are no other platforms that integrate with deep level things like
group policy. Apple comes close on the being able to apply some GPO's and
access to home folders and guid mapping, and there are other platforms that
do some of the manageability of Active Directory, but none that integrate
very cleanly. From what I've seen its less about manageability and more
about configuration management. On the surface those sound similar, but they
are actually quite different in practice.

I think the only way to get to a heterogeneous network is to implement some
sort of LDAP between two or more different directory structures. When you
say "supported", that pretty much limits you to enterprise deployments with
vendors like Red Hat and IBM, but it doesn't come cheap. The whole idea
behind support in the open source community is that its supported by the
community.