Hi: First: Novell lost. They had NDS, and then Microsoft announced Active Directory to torpedo them (before actually building it!) and succeeded. That's life in the tech lane, move on. Don't even think of putting anything new on NDS.
You *can* use Active Directory to authenticate your Macs and Linux Laptops. And you can have 'disconnected mode' such that the laptop will continue to work and authenticate after being disconnected from the network. You can also do this with non-proprietary software available from other sources (Howard is sure to chime in soon! :-). If you have a hundred or a thousand machines to authenticate, and your IT department is not already AD-entrenched (or you run the IT department! :-), your choices are pretty wide, and include Open Source solutions like LDAP, see PADL.org/com for client side software too - and if you have a huge enterprise to service, or if your IT department is already completely sold on AD (or has all of the support services in place to run it), then you can use AD as the authc/authz source. For all the Microsoft bashing that goes on (including my own above :-), AD is solid, scalable, and well supported. There *are* some gotchas if you are looking for 100% LDAP compatibility, but for authc/authz (login, groups, etc.) nothing else performs quite as well. (I do hope that Open LDAP catches up!) The main advantage of using AD at many organisations is that there is already a sizable AD infrastructure in place, with people to take care of it, and it becomes someone else's problem to maintain! If you are very strong Open Source organisation and have local 'talent' to lean on (or are a university and get student help cheap), then I would lean heavily towards the Open Source products. If you are Fortune 100 company that insists on having vendors to drag on the carpet if anything goes wrong, go with AD. In the range in the middle, you need to weigh the price, overhead, and exposure of your delicate regions. And I am sure that there will be a lot more discussion here... - Richard Edward Ned Harvey wrote: > > Hey y’all. > > I don’t use Novell, but I’m curious about them. I find the website > isn’t the most enlightening source of information, at least for me, > somebody who knows basically nothing about them. I’d like to know > what, and if, people are using them for, and in what ways my life > could be better if only I knew what I was missing... > > There was a time (over a decade ago), when Novell (Netware) was > synonymous to all the things that are now synonymous with Active > Directory. That is – User management, security, single sign on, etc. > But obviously the cross-platform capabilities of AD are somewhat > limited, and I wonder if there’s a newer implementation of something > that would be a suitable alternative. If you wanted something like AD > that works equally well for Windows, Mac, and Linux (and possibly > others) is that a complete unreality? I am aware of such things as > Kerberos and LDAP of course. But using Kerb / LDAP, you couldn’t for > example easily join a Mac or Linux laptop to a domain, login once, and > expect your laptop to continue working even after you’ve taken it > away, outside the network. > > Am I off track? Anyone care to share their experiences? > _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
