[K12OSN] RE SME Server Authentication

[Les Mikesell]

Kemp, Levi wrote:

> 	It's not that I hate linux, I'm simply lazy. To be honest a lot
> of Network Admins are. I avoid using CLI if I can, sometimes I cannot so
> I learn it, use it, forget it, and move on.
> 	You have to admit though, if you can create something easy to
> use and setup out of an OS that needs the push then why not.

It is great if it does exactly what you want, and they have done a 
pretty good job of providing what an office of windows-only clients are 
likely to want. I'm not against using it, and have used it myself, 
mostly in remote offices where I wanted someone else to manage it.

> 	For example, I used K12LTSP at home because some genius made it
> so much simpler to get up and running then a plain Fedora 6 install.
> Sure I understand it now, but to a newbie in Linux I was thrilled to
> have things working so quickly.

There's a difference, though.  If you want to add something to your 
k12ltsp, it is usually a matter of 'yum install something' and perhaps 
following some instructions for the configuration.  And you can repeat 
this, adding and learning incrementally more and more things.

> 	That's just my opinion of course and I don't want to start
> anything by it but I think that I'd have and easier time of getting an
> admin to switch to Linux servers if they could configure them without
> ever using a Linux OS before.

You can get the advantages of using Linux from an appliance setup like 
SME, but you won't learn to use Linux in an incremental manner from it. 
    If you want to change something on SME, you not only have to 
understand the configuration file that you were hoping to avoid, but you 
also need to know perl and how their database of web entries works to 
re-write the config files.  If it provided full LDAP authentication and 
NFS shared home directories for Linux users I'd use it in a lot more 
places, putting the services it doesn't provide on linux client boxes.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com