Another nix question, for administrators

[Ricker]

Ok guys,
I have a small dilema...(kind of). My deal is, I have a dual boot system here, using windows 2000 professional and linux mandrake 8.1....love it so far... but the deal is, I would LOVE to know if anyone else here is a windows 2000 network administrator like myself, and wants to use linux to administrate his/her network, like active directory and all that stuff. FROM LINUX, not from windows 2k...

see where I'm going here? I am kind of wanting to just use linux as my main system unless I'm doing some sort of ASP coding or VB coding or something where I just have to use win2k... other than that, I'd like to stay in linux the majority of the time.

Any suggestions? Anyone else doing this? I have 13 windows 2k servers, active directory, and about 90 workstations that I'm administrating...and its easy from my windows 2k box (I so want to use linux as my main system, but really cant figure it out for administering a windows 2k network i'm kind of a nix newbie still).

Just reply back if you guys have any good suggestions ok!

Peace!

[petemcevoy]

I've seen a linux box setup as a pdc on a nt4 domain using samba, but i've never seen/heard of it taking charge of active directory, i think that may be a bit beyond the limitations of samba at the moment. My suggestion to you would be to stick with the dual boot workstation for now, see what comes along in a while.

[Ricker]

Yeah, I thought that would be the case Oh well, ya can't have everything in life eh? Really, i'm not wanting the linux box to "take over" any kind of server role here, i'm just wanting the ability to administrate my windows 2000 network from a linux box... I didn't know if anyone here had heard of anyone else doing that or anything...just thought I'd ask, cause it never hurts to ask!

[UberC0der]

Cool idea.

The main problem is that neither the HURD or the Linux kernel have really good NTFS write ability (much like NTFS doesn't speak ext2 or UFS when writting to *nix), so you get things like funky ^M characters in text files and such when writting.

What you want to do would require a Samba setup like the man said, but I think managing active directory and such is out for the time being. I would not be too surprised to see something of this kind emerge in the next year or so because so many companies run disparate platforms (mine = VMS, NT/200, Solaris, Linux).

imho you should put Linux on the servers and use samba to talk to them from your workstations. (Linux is much faster, has higher up times, less maint. and runs on faster hardware i.e. Alpha's)

[petemcevoy]

Nt runs on alpha's as well does it not?

[jcdux]

you could try using vmware under *nix and installing win2k within that, I'm not at all sure whether you'd have the active directory access that way but if you did, it'd be kinda cool, you could administer your machines from within *nix, ho ho, I wonder what Bill--G would think of that?



Jamie.

[jcdux]

Originally posted by petemcevoy
Nt runs on alpha's as well does it not?

Yes it does, it's not as fast as Alpha's under *nix though.

[petemcevoy]

NTFS can be persuaded to talk to ext2, here's a snapshot of my w2k desktop whilst doing just that -
The window in the corner is BB running over ssh btw, any linux users should have a look at BB, it rocks.

[lysdexic]

Just to keep things simple, you may be best off using 2000 to administer your 2000 network. But to do some things, be sure to install samba on your workstation and you will be able to access file shares on the Windows servers. Another thing you may not be aware of but find very helpful is something called VNC. It's a cross platform protocol for sharing desktops, which means you can control the Windows servers directly from the Linux workstation.

You can download VNC from http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/

Good luck.