This is a matter of running a dumbed down OS; running systems that ensure you don't need to know anything about the systems you support, and we have all seen from the Microsoft example, that this is a dangerous and UNSTABLE INSECURE development model.

The "least intellectual investment" philosophy started in the American Public school systems, decried in the oft heard lament "Oh! Why do we have to learn this?" and exploited by Microsoft and Apple, is not a good business decision, but for some reason large companies continue to make choices based on "ease of support" perhaps due to the small numbers of lazy Americans who actually want to work for a living or be paid a great number of frogpelts for nothing (all while Eastern Indians and Middle Easterners queue up to take anything and everything that can be outsourced). Suddenly MicroSnot AD becomes a very good economic choice.

There's:

389 Directory Server: http://directory.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Download

Apache Directory LDAP v3 compliant server http://directory.apache.org

FreeIPA is the upstream project for Redhat IPA, which is now bundled in RHEL 6.2. There are plenty of production implementations of Redhat's IPA, if you need specific references, Redhat can likely provide them to you. The RHEL 6.2 package names for IPA are ipa-*.

GOsa² provides a powerful GPL'ed framework for managing accounts and systems in LDAP databases. Using GOsa² allows system administrators to easily manage users and groups, fat and thin clients, applications, phones and faxes, mail distribution lists and many other parameters. In conjunction with FAI (Fully Automatic Installation), GOsa² allows the highly automated installation of preconfigured systems. GOsa² therefore provides a single, LDAP-based point of administration for large and small environments, thus making the administration of users and systems and all related parameters manageable and easy. More info on https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa

... and a few more?

On Mon, Dec 31, 2012 at 10:56 AM, Michael Butash <michael@butash.net> wrote:

On 12/31/2012 10:17 AM, Nathan England wrote:

Excellent points. I don't entirely believe 2000 was a bomb. But in all
reality, I don't know anyone that used it.

I've seen it used, and used it quite heavily at most environments I was at when still doing more systems stuff. 2003 was obviously much improved (xp+server stuff) and quickly became defacto, but for at time, it was good for passage out of the dark ages of 16bit os's.

I saw it on a couple servers

and replaced it with linux on a few others. It wasn't horrible, but come
one! Windows ME on an NTOS kernel? I thought the frequent automatic
reboots were a "feature" so I did not have to manually reboot Windows
ME! Windows 2000 destroyed the only good "feature" Windows ME had!

Hah! Well like most I started life as a windoze guy, and my first experience with "servers" was using win2k server beta's for adventure in '99. I was rockin' AD before I'd ever had to futz with NT. Imagine my horror when I had to inherit some nt4 domains later!

That said, I learned what DNS, DHCP, LDAP/Kerberos, and IIS were good for in windoze land, then later replaced them once I got familiar enough with linux. Learning how network services work under linux without some prerequisite knowledge is more than a bit daunting, so I was glad to have had exposure and understanding from windoze worlds.

All in all, AD still has numerous advantages for directory management that simply cannot be _easily_ replaced in linux. 99% of times, I'll still see it paired with linux if for nothing else than authentication and user/group enumerations (likewise/centrify), and I'm fairly OK with that.

Nathan

-mb

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