Second attempt at posting as the switch in using an underscore to a
period in our mail addresses confuses the listserv into thinking I'm not
a list subscriber.
On 09/02/2014 6:17 PM, John Stewart wrote:
On 09/02/2014 2:45 PM, ToddAndMargo wrote: Thank you for the offer.
Got me to thinking. Whenever I come across a Windows Active Directory
(AD) server, I think under my breath "Why would you do that to
yourself?". What a slow, cumbersome, clunky mess. Within the first ten
minutes of discussing a Windows server with a client, I inevitably get
asked how to speed it up. I have to tell then that that is just the
animal they are dealing with. If I can set up a Windows server with
the least amount of services running on it, I do. I love it when they
don't want AD. (Most of my customers seldom have more than five
workstations.)
Active Directory would be overkill for five workstations, but for
large organizations Active Directory is a key part of your IT
infrastructure. Integrating our SL5 Sun Ray thin client servers with
the AD domain managed by our central computing department was a huge
step forward. This enabled our students and instructors to use the
same login and password they use to access centrally managed services
and the first time they login their Linux home directory is
automatically created.
Okay, I do realize that Linux's stability and practicality is far
superior to Redmond's stuff, which is why I prefer Linux.
That's the way I felt when I managed the Solaris based Unix systems in
our central computing department but my recent experience has been
that our Windows 2008 Terminal Server machines are more reliable than
our SL5 Sun Ray servers. It's not a hardware difference since both
sets of servers run on the same type of hardware.
I see Linux as pretty much customer driven, as opposed to driven by
the greatest, most effective marketing department in the history of
free enterprise. Question: what do you see as an advantage of Samba's
AD over just using Samba as an old fashioned Domain Controller? I take
it old-out-of-date (SL) isn't supporting Samba 4 yet.
Samba 3 has had it's day in the sun but it doesn't cut it for
supporting Windows 7 clients. We're dealing with a wacky situation in
another department where the previous IT support person declined to
simply join Windows 7 clients to the centrally managed AD domain.
What he did instead is use Microsoft Hyper-V to create an SL6 virtual
machine on a pair of Windows 2008 terminal servers (ironically part of
the centrally managed AD domain) and install Samba 4 to create his own
AD domain to support Windows 7 clients in the department.
