John,
I've been using single source authentication via Active Directory. There has been developments with Winbind (I think it is included with the most recent versions), that you can enable a module and it will map the AD SIDS to UNIX ids consistently, so you'll have the same UID number across multiple systems. Now I do it via LDAP and Microsoft Services for Unix. It is a little more to configure per user, however I can specify different home paths for users.. .ie: I keep students in /home/students and faculty in /home/faculty. You can't do that with Winbind, but then again, Winbind is a lot less work. I've just finally got LDAP failover working with my DCs.
Henry Burroughs
Technology Director
Hilton Head Preparatory School
Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2007 14:40:29 -0800
From: "john " <lists john gmail com >
Subject: multi-server/single source authenticaton was Re: [K12OSN]
Networking a new school for K12LTSP?
To: "Support list for open source software in schools."
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This has been an interesting thread. It makes me want to raise my own
question.
Is it possible to do multi-server/single source authenticaton using Active
Directory rather than LDAP? Right now, we're not able to drop active
directory for students, but will probably need to add servers as our LTSP
experiment moves forward. The sticking point has been the way winbind/samba
creates and maps unix passwords to windows passwords. Essentially each
installation of Linux that uses Active Directory for authenticaton ends up
with their own local user/pass db that makes centralized NFS homes
semi-impossible. Has anyone figured out how to scale Linux and AD?
John