Linux PDC over a VPN

The small business I work for has two small offices with a total of around 15 staff, each using a mixture of linux and windows machines.

The two offices are linked with a VPN (router to router over ADSL) and as a workgroup everything works fine. However, I need to control access to certain shares now and wnt to set up a domain.

Whats the best way to do it, given that my time and knowledge is a little bit restricted? I would like to have a PDC in one office and have users from both offices authenticate against it, but will this be really slow? Is there a better solution?

Thanks for any advice you can offer. ;)

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Originally Posted by Franky_Fondle

The small business I work for has two small offices with a total of around 15 staff, each using a mixture of linux and windows machines.

The two offices are linked with a VPN (router to router over ADSL) and as a workgroup everything works fine. However, I need to control access to certain shares now and wnt to set up a domain.

Whats the best way to do it, given that my time and knowledge is a little bit restricted? I would like to have a PDC in one office and have users from both offices authenticate against it, but will this be really slow? Is there a better solution?

Thanks for any advice you can offer. ;)

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Hi Franky,

Im not a big linux junky yet myself, i come from a very big windows support background; (so im sorry for thinking in a windows way for the next bit).

Idealy have a PDC both sides of the vpn (you said you have two sites?) have a second pdc replicating to the first pdc, the clients on that end should see that the pdc locally is closer and should do all the authentication through that dc, in turn that dc replicates any chances back to the one on the other side of the vpn ?

Hope this helps and sorry if ive gone all windows on ya :)

Thanks Cryos.

I know that having a BDC on the other side is the ideal solution, but don't have a second server to run it. Besides that, I would need a far more advanced grasp of LDAP to get it running reliably. I aim to end up at that point but was hoping there was a way of implementing a simpler system to start with.

It is pretty easy to set it up in Windows but seems a little less forgiving in Linux.

I suppose my real question was whether it is practical to authenticate over VPN or whether it is going to slow everyone down. ADSL has crumby upload speeds (128 or 256k I think).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Franky_Fondle

Thanks Cryos.

I know that having a BDC on the other side is the ideal solution, but don't have a second server to run it. Besides that, I would need a far more advanced grasp of LDAP to get it running reliably. I aim to end up at that point but was hoping there was a way of implementing a simpler system to start with.

It is pretty easy to set it up in Windows but seems a little less forgiving in Linux.

I suppose my real question was whether it is practical to authenticate over VPN or whether it is going to slow everyone down. ADSL has crumby upload speeds (128 or 256k I think).

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I havnt played much with LDAP with linux, however in windows its a piece of cake. Your user base is only 15 clients, so realistically you could just use any form of pc as your not going to have a massive load across the network.