[Samba] Samba/LDAP appliance recommendation

[Jeffrey Chan]

Hi all,

What's a good Samba+LDAP appliance these days for a small business?
Currently I used a stock Ubuntu server and did all Samda/LDAP configuration
manually. I'm looking for something that can allow my regular staff to use
as well.

1. I tried most of the popular NAS distros, like FreeNAS, NAS4Free,
OpenmediaVault, etc. Most of these NAS don't have an LDAP server built-in

2. I tried Openfiler, ClearOS and Zentyal which do have LDAP server
built-in but I haven't gotten them to import my existing Samba/LDAP data
yet. WIP.

3. I just discovered Artica NAS Appliance and Univention UCS, will be
testing them this week. Do you guys know anything about these two distros?

Sometimes I wonder if I even need LDAP, I migrated to LDAP before only to
make it a little easier (though not by much) to edit samba account data
(e.g. SID). I guess I'd like to have centralized authentication as well
(clients include Windows, Mac OSX and Linux, maybe OpenVPN as well). Is
there a simpler mode of centralized login operation? Or is LDAP the only
viable solution?

- Jeff