The Sikh Geek

As Novell recently sent me an eval version of SuSE Linux Enterprise Server v10, I thought I would see how easy it is to get it to be a member of an Active Directory Domain and to be able to authenticate Linux logins against AD. The answer is very simple using YAST which is SuSE’s configuration tool. You don’t have to touch the command line at all!

Here are some screenshots showing the results

The following screenshots show Vista RC1 Network Neighbourhood View (Phagwara is the Linux Server and Ekonkar is the SBS 2003 Server)

The following screenshots show the Linux Server view of the Network (with the permissions tab on one of Share level folders)

This is quite an achievement and actually very useful, probably more useful than having Linux (using Samba) act as the Windows Domain Controller. This way you can introduce Linux based member servers and Linux desktops and have Windows based authentication to your Active Directory environment, whilst using Windows Management tools to manage the system. If you want the details you’ll have to look at the following resource. SLES 10 abstracts all of this away from you and you can set it up with a few selections from YAST.