Re: AD-like environment under Linux
On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 11:10 PM, Gilles Mocellin
<gilles.mocellin@free.fr> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 02, 2009 at 03:45:26PM -0600, Ron Johnson wrote:
>> On 02/02/2009 03:11 PM, Nagy Dániel wrote:
>>> Is there an Active Directory - like "environment" under Linux? [I mean
>>> like the roaming profile, - that a user sits to any computer, and can
>>> log in with user/pass, and see he's desktop.]
...
> I use a samba share (under Debian) to provide roamng profiles to a Windows/Citrix farm.
> Samba, via winbind, use AD for authentification and ACLs.
>
> For the Linux client part of the question, Unix systems uses "roaming profiles" for decades.
> In fact, it is not roaming profiles, it's just a home on a server, mounted via NFS on the clients via automount, even diskless.
> Atuhentification can be done via NIS, LDAP or ... AD...
>
Note that Samba 3 can't (AFAIK) be a real AD server, though it can integrate
into an AD domain just fine (well actually it took me a couple of weeks of
working on it on and off to figure out why it wouldn't join as all the
documentation and tutorials suggested it should, and it's still not working
quite right, but at least I can provide file shares with the appropriate ACLs,
which is all I really wanted).
However, I don't know of any system quite like roaming profiles for Linux. NFS
/home isn't really the same in the general case because it relies on a constant
connection between client and server, or things will be bad. For something like
a laptop, or any non-high-availability situation, what's really needed is NFS
with transparent local caching, and so far as I'm aware it doesn't exist,
presumably because the synchronisation would be a bitch. If it *does* exist in
usable form, I would be grateful to hear about it!
Nye
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