Linux – Active Directory Domain with SAMBA or Other Tool

active-directorylinuxsamba4windows

Can I create a domain using SAMBA and set up Active Directory with SAMBA on it? And by this I mean no windows servers involved. I would also like to be able to log in from a Windows machine. Preferably on OpenSuSE.

My objective is to have a domain with centralized authentication just like AD. I want to be able to log in using both Windows and Linux computers.

  • How can I do that in SAMBA?

  • What other solution you guys recommend if Samba4 is not a viable one?

Best Answer

Sorin-Mihai, I am the IT department for a private school. There I have a Windows domain using Samba4 on a Linux server. The school has about 70 Windows PCs which are joined to the domain.

Thanks to Samba4, I take advantage of centralized account management, Group Policy (and Group Policy Preferences), shared drives, redirected folders, and roaming profiles. It works well.

Some issues I've experienced, which may or may not be due to Samba4:

  • No NTFS quota support. To do quotas, I create a separate logical volume (with LVM) for each share. I also set a maximum profile size with Group Policy, but that has been a PITA and I don't recommend it.
  • Sometimes certain files (in particular Internet Explorer favorites) refuse to copy to the server during logoff, and a scary message pops up saying that a file could not be copied. I have not found a rhyme or reason to which files refuse to copy.
  • Offline synchronization also refuses to copy some files. (Different from roaming profile issues.)
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