[Samba] Can Samba + (OpenLDAP & Kerberos) completely replace ActiveDirectory?

[steve]

On 01/09/2012 04:48 PM, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> On Mon, 2012-01-09 at 10:47 -0500, mikel king wrote:
>> I am sure this pops up on the list ever once in a while. I have
>> inherited a LAN that have a large amount of Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Linux
>> and of course because bean counters have to use financial apps that
>> only run on Windows. My long term goal is to install some sort of
>> central management system and really feel that AD is not in my best
>> interest considering that 90% of the 300+ computers are not Windows
>> based. Unfortunately the 20 or so Windows machines are running mostly
>> Win7 and there are some 2k8r2 servers in the mix somewhere.
>> Does anyone know of any good how-to, best practices/guidelines sites or documents?
>> Thoughts? Suggestions?
> Well, for the question in subject -
> "Can Samba + (OpenLDAP&  Kerberos) completely replace ActiveDirectory?"
>
> Emphatically - NO.
>
> At least if your using Samba3.
>
> Use Samba4 and you get Active Directory for free.
>
Similar situation here using samba3+ldap for Linux/win 7. We are trying 
to migrate from Samba 3 to Samba 4, but the latter does not make it easy 
to add Linux clients to the lan. We have it working (mostly) with this hack:
http://linuxcostablanca.blogspot.com/2011/12/samba-4-linux-integration-first-i-want.html
but would like to see S4 released with a bit more help for Linux 
integration.
hth,
Steve