I administer a network of 10 workstations for a small non-profit (also, I'm very inexperienced, forgive me if it's a silly question), and everything has been managed so far as if they were home PCs used by multiple persons, on some workstations a handful of employees even share a single user.
I'm considering introducing Active Directory for managing the user accounts, but we currently don't have a Windows server. A couple of Synology disk stations have been bought, and I'm wondering if I can deploy AD on it? Or is a Windows Server OS necessary for that?
Search results I've found all speak of "integrating" a Linux server or disk station into an AD domain, not using it as a domain controller.
Best Answer
You cannot really run Active Directory on non-Windows servers. You can run Samba, which is a semi-compatible open source product. On Synology, they call this "Synology Directory Server". Specs here : https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/software_spec/directory_server
Whether or not the specs and limitations meet your needs are for you to evaluate.
I'm all in favor of people learning by doing, but it might be worthwhile to engage a local consultant to help you do this. Think of the risk to your small non-profit employer if you get it wrong and cause data loss, or get it wrong and want to re-do it a couple of times. I'm not suggesting that you farm it out and be hands-off, you should definitely structure the engagement as a ride-along so you get to learn as the project is worked on.