Authenticating Linux to Active Directory

[nash11]

hay anyone here ever been able to get Linux to Authenticate Linux to Windows Active Directory? Here at work we have a large Domain running Windows Active Directory and I would like to see if I can Authenticate users to it. what I want is to login the linux server via the authentication of the windows AD . I know this can be done in Mac OS X, and a google search yeilded some results for linux. the setup is pretty complicated though and there are multiple programs I think I need to run, but not really sure what does what.

anyone have any experience with this? thx in advance.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

We've done this in the lab.

http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba/2005-February/100724.html

http://enterprise.linux.com/article.pl?sid=04/12/09/2318244&tid=102&tid=101&tid=100

There are a couple of ways to do it.

The last link shows using LDAP and Samba to handle the integration.

Its complex, but the payoff is high.

SEP

[Ivan Ferreira]

This is not too complicated and you only need to do some samba configurations and PAM modifications.

Some Linux distro like Red Hat provides the:

authconfig

Command that allows you to configure authentication using AD.

[Andrea Rossi]

the easier way is to use winbind pam module.
(man winbind)

[nash11]

Thx all suggestions ,

I have search through from the web , there are some methods could do the authentication the linux with windows active directory , it includes LDAP , Pam.d , Winbind , Samba , NIS etc , it is very confused , all these method seems have relationship but not exactly the same architecture , can anyone advise what is the different of these methods ? which one of them is better ? thx

[Ivan Ferreira]

To authenticate with Windows AD, you only need to read about SAMBA.

The other methods are for other type of authentication based on directory servers.

Windows Active Directory is LDAP based + Kerberos based, but you don't have to worry about this, you only need to configure SAMBA correctly.

[nash11]

thx reply ,

I am trying to setup the samba in linux side , can advise what I need to do at windows ( AD sever ) side ? do I need to export some directory and release any permission for linux client to login ? thx.

[Ivan Ferreira]

You don't have to do anything at the windows side.