CentOS, Windows Server 2008, LDAP = Yay

[random0munky]

This will be my first thread, yay =)

Well my deal at the moment is to have linux boxes running CentOS 5 to talk to Windows Server 2008 using an active directory where all login authentication will be ran against the Window's active directory. There's also a thread, hosted by LuckMe where he stated to have the home folder via network (ssh) where all the linux boxes have a home folder but not local, but through the network. I'm really new to linux, but I've been edumucating myself with commands and how the structure of linux works, (using Ubuntu on my laptop).

I've been googlin the internet for documentation on how to accomplish this feat but was wondering if you guys have any tips/advice/links/awesome stuff to add to help me get started with this project. Thank You.

[random0munky]

Anybody have anything? I see there's been 59 views but nobody has posted anything. I have found this post to be really helpful: http://blog.wazollc.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=2
Just wondering if anybody can expand on this? Thank You.

[gamblor01]

First things first -- welcome to justlinux!

I read through the post and it seems pretty straightforward, though I didn't happen to notice what you were talking about (suggesting to make the home directory a network folder that all of the Linux systems connect to). If I am reading this correctly, what they are trying to suggest is to mount a remote filesystem under /home. To be even more precise, they suggest that each and every CentOS system you have mounts the same remote filesystem so that they all share common files under /home. Thus, if a user on one system makes a change to a file under /home, or adds/deletes a file, all of the other systems will see the same change. It's much like "sharing" a drive in Windows (and then having a bunch of other machines mount that drive via the "net use" command or using "map network drive").

Your system probably has a home directory that is under your root partition (also known as / ). You can check this by opening a command prompt and just typing the command: mount

If this didn't show anything mounted as /home then there is not separate mount point for /home.

To make one, it's pretty simple (though the syntax of the command varies depending on what type of remote filesystem you are connecting to, the options you want, etc. -- which can seem daunting at first.), but essentially the only requirement is that you to edit your /etc/fstab. This is a table that the kernel reads when it starts up to see which mount points to create for you automatically. Essentially you would need to modify /etc/fstab on each system to all point to some remote filesystem (over NFS I suppose?). I'm not really sure why this is beneficial though. So unless you have some compelling reason to do this, why not ignore it for now. You can always go back and create a separate mount point for /home later.

[random0munky]

Great that clarifies a few things. I'll try it out and post up what I find. Thank You

[random0munky]

I'm having a little bit of trouble with the authentication can someone clarify and expand the settings in the krb5.conf file. Thank You.