Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Active Directory

Microsoft Active Directory (AD) is the one system that everyone dreams of replacing with an open source solution. William Muriithi gave an interesting talk about how he tried to use BIND, a Kerberos server, OpenLDAP, and Samba 3 to replace an Active Directory server. Unfortunately, even if you get all of that working, you still can't eliminate the AD server completely. AD has several peculiarities and extensions that are missing in the open source solution which make it unworkable with the Windows clients.

The best hope for replacing AD is Samba 4 but it is still only in alpha release. It looks like ditching Active Directory will remain a dream for a little while longer.

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