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

[mikel king]

On Jan 9, 2012, at 2:34 PM, Natxo Asenjo wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 9, 2012 at 4:47 PM, mikel king <mikel.king at olivent.com> 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.
> 
> for the unix side of things I would recommend ipa from redhat (you can
> read about it in http://freeipa.org). It accomplishes for linux/unix
> most of what AD does for Windows. For the Windows side, use samba4. To
> get best of both worlds, use a kerberos trust between both realms.
> 
> IPA is also available out of the box for the redhat clones, obviously.
> As this is not a topic for the samba list, I will leave it at that,
> but not before saying that it really rocks.
> 
> -- 
> natxo

Thanks Natxo,

I am not sure if this would be a fit for us as we only have one Red Hat based Linux box. The majority are FreeBSD or Debian. Still it is an interesting prospect and I really appreciate your sharing it. 

Cheers,
m