Redhat 8.0 Active Directory Authentication

[kickballmvp2006]

Attempting to get my RH8 machine to authenticate through Active Directory
so that we can stop using the local accounts. I have been googling around
and most of what I find is on how to configure Samba. This is good, but I need something that will explain to me how to set it up so AD users can log on to the Linux machine. Does anyone know of any good articles/tutorials on this?

[coopstah13]

google is your friend

Samba & Active Directory - SambaWiki

[kickballmvp2006]

Yes... Uncle Google has been there for me on many occassions

I'm wondering is there a way to do AD authentication through Linux without using Samba? The reason I ask is because from compliancy standpoint, auditors want you to have smb disabled as it's labeled as not being secure enough for there standards. Is there another way around this? Some other protocol I can use? Or possibly a way of encrypting Samba as to meet compliancy requirements?

[Roxoff]

But Active Directory is just a database (an LDAP with specific schemas). It's a bit of a grey area, as AD and Windows Domains are so tightly integrated, but surely you'd authenticate against the Windows Domain, not the AD? Active Directory is where the account information is stored, not where it is checked. That happens on your trusted server.

Would it not be possible to enable Kerberos on the Windows servers and allow authentication using that method? I'm sure PAM can be made to do that.

[kickballmvp2006]

Well my goal is to do away with all the local accounts I have on these Linux machines so that when they remote in they must use AD to authenticate into the Linux machine that runs RH8.

From what I have been reading you have to have SAMBA enabled to do that. But I think SAMBA is against compliancy rules. So how else would I authenticate if I can't use SAMBA as my means of hooking that up?

[HROAdmin26]

The Samba project is *practically* the only opensource project with any widespread interoperability success with Windows domains/AD. Samba is a collection of tools/daemons that provide different functionality. You can read more about Samba on their homepage.

As can be found with Google, your options are primarily Samba/Winbind or Kerberos - a WindowsNetworking article.

You may also want to update your RH version to get the latest libraries/binaries. RH8 was originally released in 2002.

8.0 (Psyche), September 30, 2002 (Linux 2.4.18-14)